SMALL HOURS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does small hours mean? 

• SMALL HOURS (noun)
  The noun SMALL HOURS has 1 sense:

1. the hours just after midnight

  Familiarity information: SMALL HOURS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• SMALL HOURS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The hours just after midnight

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Hypernyms ("small hours" is a kind of...):

hour; time of day (clock time)

Holonyms ("small hours" is a part of...):

dark; night; nighttime (the time after sunset and before sunrise while it is dark outside)

 Context examples 

Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)