watch night

1. 1.

   a devotional service (especially on New Year's Eve)

   Broaderservice

Questions about watch night

What does watch night mean?

watch night means "a devotional service (especially on New Year's Eve)".

Is watch night a common word?

watch night is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.