A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
white night
A white night is a summer night at high latitude when the sun dips below the horizon but not far enough for the sky to get properly dark, so twilight lasts from dusk straight through to dawn. It happens above about sixty degrees of latitude, and it is distinct from the midnight sun, where the sun does not set at all.
Etymology
The English term translates the Russian, and the phrase is associated above all with Saint Petersburg, which sits at just under sixty degrees and holds a festival for the season. Dostoevsky’s story of that title fixed the phrase in literature, and the same term is used in the Nordic languages and in French for the same weeks.
Notes