noon

Etymology 1

From Middle English noen, none, non, from Old English nōn (“the ninth hour”), from a Germanic borrowing of classical Latin nōna (“ninth hour”) (short for nōna hōra), feminine of nōnus (“ninth”). Cognate with Dutch noen, obsolete German Non, Norwegian non.

noun

1. The time of day when the sun is in its zenith; twelve o'clock in the day, midday.
   On Sundays, I love to have a lie-in until noon.
   The race is due to start at noon sharp.
   The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin. 1933, Twentieth Amendment to the United States Constitution
2. (now rare) The corresponding time in the middle of the night; midnight.
   So the sad mother at the noon of night / From bloody Memphis stole her silent flight […]. 1789, Erasmus Darwin, The Loves of the Plants, J. Johnson, page 116
   When night was at its noon I heard a voice chanting the Koran in sweetest accents […]. 1885, Sir Richard Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Night 17
3. (obsolete) The ninth hour of the day counted from sunrise; around three o'clock in the afternoon.
4. (figurative) The highest point; culmination.

verb

1. To relax or sleep around midday
   We presently turned just aside from the trail into an episode of beautiful prairie, one of a succession along the plateau at the crest of the range. At this height of about five thousand feet, the snows remain until June. In this fair, oval, forest-circled prairie of my nooning, the grass was long and succulent, as if it grew in the bed of a drained lake. 1853, Theodore Winthrop, The Canoe and the Saddle
   Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for a horse carrying triple—man, woman, and armor; then we stopped for a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook. 1889, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Chapter XX
   Well, we crossed and nooned, lying around on purpose to give them a good lead, and when we hit the trail back in these sand-hills, there he was, not a mile ahead, and you can see there was no chance to get around 1906, Andy Adams, The Double Trail
   They nooned at a spring and squatted about the cold and blackened sticks of some former fire and ate cold beans and tortillas out of a newspaper. 1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, page 157

Etymology 2

noun

1. The letter ن in the Arabic script.