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Definition
happening daily, over the period of a day, or in the day rather than the eveningA comprehensive dictionary will include specialized meanings in zoology, botany, and Christianity.
- studied the creature's diurnal activities
- diurnal flowers are open during the day and closed at night
- the diurnal slumber of bats
- Every sunrise and every sunset the bird songs were near-deafening: a diurnal cacophony of notes clear and limpid, bizarre and unmelodious.James Vance Marshall -- Walkabout
- The dragons graze through these very woods in the daytime—dragons are diurnal, rats are nocturnal and go into their holes in the heat of the day.Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road
- Thus he never failed to pay his diurnal court to her; and the self-satisfied Gascon was convinced that sooner or later she could not fail to respond.Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers
- She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.Thomas Hardy -- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- The females and the pups led a more diurnal life.Farley Mowat -- Never Cry Wolf
- The Earth moved slowly in its diurnal course.Douglas Adams -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- The streets and sidewalks of Bedley Run truly seemed as much mine as any person's, their almost affirming solidity underfoot, bouncing me along on my diurnal way.Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life
- During the day the animals obsequiously followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still for the flies.Thomas Hardy -- Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- It is an agile and keensighted creature, diurnal and social in habits, and feeding in its native range—the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa—on, among other things, scorpions, to whose venom it is completely immune.Yann Martel -- Life of Pi
- Upstairs he walked around thinking of the matter and laying out his climbing clothes advantageously on the faint heater; he again encountered Nicole's telegram, still unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itinerary.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night
- Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of Mizrach, the east.James Joyce -- Ulysses
- I am abroad at night, my good girl, because the earth in its diurnal revolutions leaves the light of the sun but half the time on any given meridian, and because what I have to do cannot be performed in twelve or fifteen consecutive hours.James Fenimore Cooper -- The Prairie
- There was an astronomer, who had undertaken to place a sun-dial upon the great weathercock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind.Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels
- No chance-child was he, for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his parents, who lived hard by; his mother being a washerwoman, and his father a drunken soldier, discharged with a wooden leg, and a diurnal pension of twopence-halfpenny and an unstateable fraction.Charles Dickens -- Oliver Twist
- She had his companionship no longer; I esteemed it a duty to supply its lack, as much as possible, with mine: an inefficient substitute; for I could only spare two or three hours, from my numerous diurnal occupations, to follow her footsteps, and then my society was obviously less desirable than his.Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights
- Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring; Ere twice in murk and occidental damp Moist Hesperus hath quench'd his sleepy lamp; Or four-and-twenty times the pilot's glass Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass; What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly, Health shall live free, and sickness freely die.William Shakespeare -- All's Well That Ends Well
- But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that writes, for the public eye and for distant time,—and which inevitably lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so doing,—there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony.Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables