Look up bedtime in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Bedtime (also called putting to bed or tucking in) is a ritual part of parenting to help children feel more secure,[1] and become accustomed to a more rigid schedule of sleep than they might prefer. It may involve bedtime stories, children's songs, nursery rhymes, bed-making and getting children to change into nightwear. In some religious households prayers are said shortly before going to bed.[2]
In adult use, the term means simply "time for bed", similar to curfew, as in "It's past my bedtime". Some people are accustomed to drinking a nightcap or herbal tea at bedtime.
Look up lights out in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
In boarding schools and on trips or holidays that involve young people, the equivalent of bedtime is lights out or lights-out; a term also used in prisons, hospitals, in the military, and in sleep research.
^A Scottish prayer: "I am going now into the sleep, / Be it that I in health shall wake; / If death be to me in deathly sleep, / Be it that in thine own arm's keep, / O God of grace, to new life I wake; / O be it in thy dear arm's keep, / O God of grace, that I shall awake!" (from Poems of the Western Highlanders, 1900; in The Oxford Book of Prayer, general editor: George Appleton. Oxford University Press; no. 325 at p. 101
