A devotional watch (especially on the eve of a religious festival)

Usage examples of vigil.

I shall tell thee the boon that I would ask of thee and thy generosity has granted me, and it is that on the morrow thou wilt dub me a knight, and that this night in the chapel of thy castle I shall keep vigil over my armor, and on the morrow, as I have said, what I fervently desire will be accomplished so that I can, as I needs must do, travel the four corners of the earth in search of adventures on behalf of those in need, this being the office of chivalry and of knights errant, for I am one of them and my desire is disposed to such deeds.

I caret caret Hffcaret For three days Alec and Seregil kept their cold vigil and at last their patience was rewarded.

Yet he felt all a murderer as he gazed at the ten small carcasses laid out arow, and the memory of his vigil and its end, indeed of the whole day, though it was the day of his most marvelous adventure, remains to him as the broken recollections of a phantasmagoria.

Jimmy had just resigned himself, after another glance at the shelf, to a bookless vigil, when his eye was caught by a name on the cover of the last in the row so unexpected that he had to look again to verify the discovery.

Anyway, after a while, during that sun-bleached, snowblind vigil of booze and lies and pornography, the girls tended to mangle and dismember in my mind.

The pollen sacs of the nettles were ripe, and every now and then the vigil would be enlivened by the dehiscence of these, the bursting of the sacs sounding exactly like the crack of a pistol, and the pollen grains as big as buckshot pattered all about them.

No sound was to be heard in the little cottage except the ticking of the wheezy clock, as Dyce kept her solitary vigil by the side of the man she loved.

I have tried to keep a sharp vigil against the muddling results of an essentialist sexuality.

A shower of large, bound ledgers fell onto Fand as the brown vigil hurled her against the bookcase.

Parz had been joined in his silent vigil beneath Virtuals of the stationary Jovian icosahedron by an unseen congregation of millions.

He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of his vigil demanded that he seek: a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be written in his solitudeif that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there.

Master Polydore Vigil, and his wife, Dame Dreamsweet, and old Mat Pyepowders and his preposterous, chattering dame, and the Peregrine Laquers and the Goceline Flacks and the Hyacinth Baldbreeches -- in fact, all the cream of the society of Lud-in-the-Mist, and each of them labelled with his or her appropriate joke.

The shadows in the courtyard lengthened, but the guard below the balcony did not relax his vigil.

Mademoiselle Linders had gained her present position not less by her superior birth and education, than by that to which she would more willingly have attributed her elevation--a certain asceticism of life which she affected, an extra observance of fasts and vigils, which the good nuns looked upon with reverence, without caring to emulate such peculiar sanctity in their own persons.

Wellington Mape had taken his departure, Lem turned again to his vigil at the car window.