Definition of "nightingale" []

• A European songbird (Luscinia megarhynchos) with reddish-brown plumage, noted for the melodious song of the male at night during the breeding season. (noun)
• Any of various other nocturnal songbirds of the genus Luscinia. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Now we own that what there is so _indecorous_ in the first comparison, or so especially _decorous_ in the second, we cannot discover; neither can we make out whether Pope is the organ or the bell -- the nightingale or the cuckoo; we suppose that Mr. Hunt knows that Pope was called by his contemporaries the _nightingale_, but we never heard Milton and"
• "He sends his courtiers to take a nightingale from the nearby forest and present her as a guest at court."
• "Voiture, in his thirty-fifth letter to Costar, compliments the musical atom of Marini, the feathered voice, the living breath clothed in plumage, the winged song, the small spirit of harmony, hidden amidst diminutive lungs; all of which terms are employed to convey the word nightingale:"