Noctivagant – Wacky Word Wednesday

Are you a night owl or an early bird? Today’s Wacky Word Wednesday, a weekly celebration of the wackiest and most interesting words from around the world, focuses on those who avoid 9-to-5 jobs and love working the graveyard shift instead.

Noctivagant [noc-tiv-A-gant] -adj Going about in the night; night-wandering.

Noctivagant, a combination of the Latin nocti, “night,” and vagari, “to wander,” is an adjective used to describe those who are active during the night.  Today’s wacky word might remind you of lucifugous, a wacky word we highlighted a couple months ago. Lucifugous means having a dislike of light and is used to describe creatures that avoid the sun. Noctivagant people are not necessarily afraid of light, but they do lead night lives and so probably sleep during the day.

While some people are noctivagant because they enjoy the nightlife, others are night owls because of their profession. According to the 2004 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 15 million Americans work full-time on evening and night shifts, or have irregular work schedules.  In today’s globalized world, more businesses are required to operate across multiple time-zones; that means the graveyard shift, previously only expected of factory workers, security guards and other blue-collar workers, is now also being filled by white-collar employees.

Working at night can be beneficial, especially to working parents. Take, for example, Dorothy Stevens, a grocery shopper for an Internet grocery company, who works nights so she can raise her children during the day.  And if you are a nighthawk who struggles to work a 9-to-5 job, you might want to consider a job that requires 24-hour coverage—such as healthcare work, air traffic control, and computer operation.

As usual, we’ve provided a few sentence examples to help you better understand today’s wacky word:

• His noctivagant tendencies allowed him to see into many lighted windows in his neighborhood.
• My husband suffers from insomnia, so lately he’s taken many noctivagant trips to work at 4:00 A.M. (Jaime Theler)

And that’s all for today’s edition of Wacky Word Wednesday. Have a great rest of the week and see you next time!

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