noontide means midday, noon. Lexicurio rates it Rare gem — a strength score of 78 out of 100.
Why “noontide” is a great word
NOONTIDE — [Noun] The time of day at midday; also, the peak or culminating point of something. From Middle English non-tyde, from Old English nōntīd ("noontide"), equivalent to noon ("midday") + tide ("time"). Unlike "noon," which fixes a precise meridian, or "zenith," which charts a celestial apex, noontide evokes the heavy, sustained atmosphere of the day's peak. It is the sun pinned motionless in a bleached sky, the profound, almost audible silence of a world holding its breath, and the shadowless, clarifying light that erases ambiguity—a perfect, ephemeral apex from which the only possible movement is decline.
Etymology
From Middle English non-tyde, from Old English nōntīd (“noontide”), equivalent to noon + tide.
noun
- Midday, noon.“[…] I haue bedymn'd / The Noone tide Sun, call'd forth the mutenous windes, / And twixt the greene Sea, and the azur'd vault / Set roaring warre: […]”
- Climax; high point.“Yet there are noble passages in his later poems: and even the latest have their own peculiar charm of serenity and kindliness,—a tranquil sunset, as it were, succeeding not unmeetly to the fiery splendours of his noontide course.”