night letter
- noun
- Archaic
:
telegrama nocturno
- Pauli drafted a night letter to Reines and Cowan that Reines only saw 30 years later (when Charles P. Enz, a student of Pauli's, sent him a copy).
Examples
-
are you sure there's no night letter lying around
-
Send them a night letter?
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She decided to send a night letter to her family, hoping they would receive it by morning.
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The night letter arrived just in time for the family reunion planned for the next day.
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He wrote a night letter to inform his friends of the sudden change in plans for the trip.
Synonyms
87
6.9
A written message sent by telegraph before phones
A cheaper written message sent abroad and delivered the next day
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is transparently built from 'night' + 'letter', so a B1 learner who knows both words will likely infer it refers to a message associated with nighttime (e.g., a letter sent at night). However, the specific historical/technical sense (a reduced‑rate telegram for next‑day delivery) is conventional and postal/telegraphic, so that precise meaning is not fully predictable from the parts.
Etymology
Night letter comes from old telegraph offices. At night, workers sent groups of telegrams at a lower price so they would be 'delivered the next day', and so a night letter came to mean a cheaper message sent at night to arrive the following day.