daylight
Americannoun
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the light of day.
At the end of the tunnel they could see daylight.
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public knowledge or awareness; openness.
The newspaper article brought the scandal out into the daylight.
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the period of day; daytime.
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a clear space or gap, especially between two people or things that should be close together, as between the knees of a horseback rider and a saddle.
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disagreement or mental distance between two people.
There's very little daylight between the two senators' stances on the issue.
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Informal. daylights, mental soundness, consciousness, or wits: I'd like to beat/knock the daylights out of him!
The noise scared the daylights out of us.
I'd like to beat/knock the daylights out of him!
adjective
verb (used with object)
idioms
noun
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light from the sun
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( as modifier )
daylight film
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the period when it is light; daytime
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daybreak
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to understand something previously obscure
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to realize that the end of a difficult task is approaching
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Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of daylight
A Middle English word dating back to 1175–1225; see origin at day , light 1
Explanation
The period of each day when the sun is shining is daylight. If you work as a lifeguard at the town pool, your job takes place during daylight. You can use daylight and daytime interchangeably, although daylight also means "daytime light" or "the light of the sun." If you lose electricity in your house for a few days, you might have to stick to reading when there's daylight. Many public parks are only open during daylight hours. If someone scares the living daylights out of you, they terrify you — this colloquial phrase comes from an old sense of the eyes being referred to as daylights.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Solar can’t fill the winter power gap because of “snow, clouds, and shortened daylight hours,” the grid operator says.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 7, 2026
It would not actually increase the amount of daylight, but shift an hour of it from the morning to the evening by the clock.
From Salon ● Oct. 3, 2026
Los Angeles County Fire Department Incident Command “was unaware that the fire had progressed through west Altadena until the daylight hours on January 8, 2025,” the report read.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 2, 2026
"Getting daylight early on in the day is really going to help to keep your body in check. How you sleep at night starts with how you wake up in the morning."
From BBC ● Sep. 22, 2026
I was tempted to go home and wait for daylight.
From "Black Star, Bright Dawn" by Scott O'Dell
A creek will be daylighted by the light-rail station.
From Seattle Times ● May 22, 2022
Those issues aren’t daylighted, and it makes it harder for us and the people to know what’s going on.
From Seattle Times ● Oct. 22, 2021
During one, Smallwood the contractor says, the tour group trekked down to the site’s man-made stream, once confined to pipes but now brilliantly daylighted with fish ladders, stream-appropriate soothing gurgles and actual returning fish.
From Seattle Times ● May 11, 2017
And he gets in a dig about the Master being schooled, a.k.a. daylighted and singed, by Setrakian.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 24, 2015
Almost before anybody knew it, four-year-old Princess had daylighted Shue Fly by a length and a half and huge sums of money were changing hands.
From Time Magazine Archive
And an extensive 2014 report on daylighting by Architect, the institute’s magazine, cites multiple studies that show that access to daylight can increase productivity, comfort and well-being.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 1, 2021
Long was dreading the process, daylighting all that paperwork she didn’t want to face and putting their money into investments that could lose value.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 28, 2020
A signature project was restoring the base’s Crissy Field airstrip to 20 acres of tidal marsh and daylighting thousands of feet of freshwater creek that fed it.
From Scientific American ● Jun. 13, 2019
Once it reached the southern end of the park, the daylighting task would become devilishly complicated.
From New York Times ● Feb. 16, 2016
The architectural details on exteriors evolved under daylighting outdoors so that their form has been determined by the shadows desired.
From Visual Illusions Their Causes, Characteristics and Applications by Matthew Luckiesh
Some of that sunlight travels through Earth’s atmosphere before it travels to the moon, and this can affect earthshine’s brightness, especially if the daylit part of our planet is strewn with highly reflective clouds.
From Scientific American ● Jul. 21, 2023
The painting, “L’empire des lumières,” which juxtaposes a nocturnal lamplit street with a serene daylit sky, is one of the most celebrated and enigmatic images in 20th-century art.
From New York Times ● Mar. 2, 2022
Art schools have always had open plans, daylit work spaces and power tools.
From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 2016
The landscape is animated—“the wind in its long hair of eternal night,” “the eye of the river,” “the eyelashes of the trees”—and dreamy, rather than daylit.
From Slate ● Mar. 26, 2015
I sat there for surely an hour, staring at a daylit hole in the window blind, without smoking or taking off my coat or loosening my necktie.
From "Nine Stories" by J. D. Salinger
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
