noontide

From Middle English non-tyde, from Old English nōntīd (“noontide”), equivalent to noon +‎ tide.

noontide (plural noontides)

1. (literary) midday, noon

   Synonyms: meridian, nones, sext; see also Thesaurus:midday

   • 1610–1611 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i], page 16:

     […] 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: […]

   • 1966, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 4, in The Crying of Lot 49, New York: Bantam Books, published 1976, →ISBN, page 59:

     Around them all, Negroes carried gunboats of mashed potatoes, spinach, shrimp, zucchini, pot roast, to the long, glittering steam tables, preparing to feed a noontide invasion of Yoyodyne workers.

2. (figuratively) climax; high point
   • 1879, F. D. Morice, Pindar, chapter 3, page 28:

     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.