sunlight

English

Sunlight (1)

Etymology

From Middle English sonnelight, sunneliht, from Old English sunnan lēoht (“sunlight”),[1] equivalent to sun +‎ light. Cognate with Dutch zonlicht (“sunlight”), German Low German Sünnenlücht (“sunlight”), German Sonnenlicht (“sunlight”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈsʌnˌlaɪt/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Rhymes: -ʌnlaɪt
  • Hyphenation: sun‧light

Noun

sunlight (countable and uncountable, plural sunlights)

  2. All the electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun; especially, that in the visible spectrum and that bathes the Earth.
    Hypernyms: starlight (broad sense only) < natural light < light < EMR, electromagnetic radiation < radiation < energy
    Meronym: sunbeams
    Coordinate terms: starlight (usual idiomatic sense), moonlight
    Near-synonym: daylight
    Sunlight on the skin gives you vitamin D.
    • 2013 June 8, “Obama goes troll-hunting”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8839, London: The Economist Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 55:
      The solitary, lumbering trolls of Scandinavian mythology would sometimes be turned to stone by exposure to sunlight. Barack Obama is hoping that several measures announced on June 4th will have a similarly paralysing effect on their modern incarnation, the patent troll.
    • 2013 July 16, skullsinthestars, “Simple fun with polarizers!”, in Skulls in the Stars‎[1], archived from the original on 23 April 2025:
      Instead of using unpolarized sunlight as my light source and then filtering it with a polarizer, I can just use my screen as a source of polarized light.
  4. (figuratively) Brightness, hope; a positive outlook.
    Synonyms: sunshine, sunniness
  6. Synonym of sunrise.
    Synonyms: daylight, daybreak, dayspring, dawn; see also Thesaurus:dawn
  7. (attributive) Synonym of photic (“describing that part of the near-surface ocean in which photosynthesis is possible.”).
    sunlight zone

Synonyms

Derived terms

Translations

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Translations to be checked

Verb

sunlight (third-person singular simple present sunlights, present participle sunlighting, simple past and past participle sunlighted)

  1. To work on the side (at a secondary job) during the daytime.

References

  1. ^ Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, Robert K. Barnhart (ed.), Chambers, 1988

Anagrams

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