nightingale

noun

1. A Eurasian and African songbird, Luscinia megarhynchos, family Muscicapidae, famed for its beautiful singing at night; a common nightingale.

   “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet neere day: / It was the Nightingale, and not the Larke, / That pier'ſt the fearefull hollow of thine eare”

   “Some admired the external beauties of the objects they beheld, like the nightingale in love with the roſe.”

   “The oaks around were the home of a tribe of nightingales.”

   “And David's Lips are lock't; but in divine High piping Péhlevi, with "Wine! Wine! Wine! Red Wine!" — the Nightingale cries to the Rose That yellow Cheek of her's to'incarnadine.”

   “The air, too, was heavy with perfume, and a nightingale, high in the heavens, gave out a cheery song of welcome.”

2. A kind of flannel scarf with sleeves, formerly worn by invalids when sitting up in bed.
3. (attributive)A temporary facility built at short notice during the COVID-19 pandemic, or by extension any other emergency.

   “In June, the National Education Union wrote to the government, asking it to set up “Nightingale schools”: classrooms in churches, libraries and leisure centres.”

   “This scenario would put the NHS under extreme pressure and lead to more non-Covid patients being turned away and use of all available space in Nightingales.”

   “In order to create more prison spaces, Farage said his party would spend £5bn to build and operate five new low-security 'Nightingale' prisons on Ministry of Defence land, creating 12,400 spaces for "lower category offenders".”

   “The last place he showed me was an empty ward, once used as a Nightingale ward for Covid.”

name

1. (countable, uncountable)A surname.

   “After the death of his [Verney's] first wife, he proposed to Florence Nightingale but she refused him. Later he married her sister, and for many years Claydon was Miss Nightingale's second home.”

2. (countable, uncountable)A hamlet in Wheatland County, Alberta, Canada, named after Florence Nightingale.