Today's word is nycthemeron. Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged defines it as ": a full period of a night and a day." The OED concurs, entering it as "A period of twenty-four hours, consisting of a day and a night." I'm not sure why anyone needed a special word for this. Especially since the use of the simple "day" to mean a 24-hour cycle predates nycthemeron in English by at least four hundred years, more if you're willing to keep tracing it back through Old English. Wikipedia suggests that it was used specifically as a technical term to avoid ambiguity, which I suppose is plausible, but I don't find their backing terribly convincing, especially considering there isn't any.
All of this does, however, bring up an interesting point about language. Nycthemeron breaks down in Greek roots into nyct, meaning night, and hemera, meaning day. That's right, when the Greeks wanted to talk about a night-day cycle, they called it a "night-day." This reminded me of a recent XKCD comic, wherein Etymology Man notes that the similar-sounding word "entomology" comes from the Greek "entomon" (insect), from "entomos" (segmented). And I realized-- I'm so glad that I speak such a rich and nuanced language as English. In ancient Greek, they apparently saw little bugs crawling around, and decided to call them the equivalent of "crawlies." A lovely piece of art in two panels? A "two-fold"-- or diptych. Everything would be literal descriptions--not very creative. Frankly, it's hard to imagine how they managed to write anything at all poetic.
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