A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
owl light
Owl light is dusk, the failing light at the end of the day when owls begin to move. It is an old English term, used from the sixteenth century, and it names the hour by what starts happening in it rather than by the position of the sun.
Etymology
The name is a plain compound and it belongs to the largest single family of English words for a time of day. English has an unusual number of them and each one takes a different angle on the same hour: gloaming for the light that remains, dusk and dimpsy for the dimming, cockshut for the time a net was set for woodcock, crepuscule for the astronomical stages, and nightfall for the arrival of the dark.
Notes
The related term owl time means the middle of the night, and candle-lighting and lamplight were both used for the same window as owl light in periods when the transition was marked by an action rather than a clock. The persistence of so many words for dusk in English is a fair measure of how much it mattered to people whose working day ended when they could no longer see.