How to Use small hours in a Sentence

small hours

plural noun
  • Plus there’s no room in there for that big log that will burn half the night and smolder into the small hours.
    — New Atlas, 31 Aug. 2025
  • The cars finish their practice in the wee small hours of the morning without any fans watching.
    — David Hill, Rolling Stone, 14 Jan. 2024
  • Most belonged to poor farmers who had ridden into the city in the small hours, eager to give blood.
    — The Economist, 10 Oct. 2019
  • Wine and champagne flowed, and jewelry was sold, into the small hours of the morning.
    — Matthew Futterman, New York Times, 1 July 2023
  • The quiet and warmth of small hours, bodies pressed upon each other as an eyelid flutters open.
    — Krista Stevens, Longreads, 13 Mar. 2021
  • This will inevitably push many games back into evening slots, which means kick-offs in the small hours of the morning in Europe.
    — Matt Slater, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2025
  • Where concerned neighbors emerged from their homes in the small hours of the morning when a bike thief was spotted jumping over our garden gates.
    — Laura Hawkins, Vogue, 8 Aug. 2024
  • The Senate approved the measure in the small hours of Thursday morning.
    — Scott Neuman, NPR, 17 July 2025
  • To sip strong aromatic coffee from midnight to the small hours always brings something interesting to the page.
    — Deborah Levy, The Cut, 1 July 2018
  • Schools and workplaces open at night, construction sites buzz in the small hours under massive floodlights, and outdoor recreation takes place in the twilights of dawn and dusk.
    — Big Think, 31 Mar. 2026
  • Most meteor showers are best after midnight, but this one is particularly elusive, peaking in the wee small hours just before dawn.
    — Nicole Clausing, Sunset Magazine, 4 May 2023
  • Most meteor showers are best after midnight, but this one is particularly elusive, peaking in the wee small hours just before dawn.
    — Nicole Clausing, Sunset Magazine, 4 May 2023
  • Anyone who’s ever struggled to fall or stay asleep in a hot room knows all too well the frustration of tossing and turning in a tangle of sweaty sheets until the small hours of the morning.
    — Caroline Tien, SELF, 28 June 2024
  • Some formulas can be premixed and stored in the fridge for up to 24 hours, which could save an exhausted mom from having to drowsily scoop powder in the small hours of the night.
    — David Howard, New York Times, 13 Apr. 2020
  • The airy confines of the stately home where Allied commanders are gathered provide both the grandeur and the contrast to the minutiae inked out on vast maps in the small hours of the night.
    — Daniel Jonah Wolpert, NPR, 29 May 2026
  • Then the great plan came crashing down, with Bloomberg News reporting in the small hours of Thursday that Fiat had withdrawn its offer.
    — latimes.com, 6 June 2019
  • In neighboring Shanxi province, a bus carrying 14 people went missing near a village in the small hours of Sunday.
    — Nectar Gan, CNN Money, 28 July 2025
  • Instead of having to stay up till midnight and into the small hours to see lightning-quick shooting stars popping in a dark sky, the Draconids tend to show themselves just after sunset.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 5 Oct. 2024
  • The game garnered 256 million hours of viewing in India, an incredible figure for a contest that finished in the small hours of the morning there.
    — Matt Slater, The Athletic, 26 July 2024
  • In fact, a good riddance vibe imbued much of the horn-honking, firework-lighting and air horn-sounding celebrations into the not-so-small hours on Monday in Rome.
    — Jason Horowitz, New York Times, 12 July 2021
  • There was once in New York, not all that long ago, but certainly no longer, power tables fully occupied in the wee small hours of every morning in great saloons throughout our fair city.
    — Richard E. Farley, Town & Country, 26 July 2015
  • The coat check at the Salamander Hotel was still so backed up into the small hours of Monday that people took matters into their own hands and pushed past the claim table to fetch their own coats.
    — Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 21 Jan. 2025
  • Tough Love lives in the latter mode, in the small hours of a night that hasn’t quite dissolved into morning, when life seems perilously short, breathtakingly urgent, and incredibly endless all at once.
    — Reed Jackson, SPIN, 22 May 2026
  • There’s no dress code, no evening port briefings, and no early morning shore excursions because the bar is up and running until, as Frank Sinatra famously sang it, the wee small hours of the morning.
    — Ellen Uzelac, chicagotribune.com, 26 Nov. 2019
  • Cairenes are used to sitting at cafes until the small hours, but energy price spikes from the Iran war pushed authorities to impose a curfew, and dim or shut off streetlights, one of several such efforts to preserve fuel worldwide.
    — Tom Chivers, semafor.com, 27 Apr. 2026
  • Billionaire investor Bill Ackman posted a lengthy tweet in the small hours of the morning promising to financially back any viable candidate who could still defeat Mamdani.
    — Diane Brady, Fortune, 26 June 2025
  • By day's end everyone in Santiago do Iguape is tucked in—the imposing Paraguaçu River ensures abundance to the fishermen who brave its mighty waters in the wee small hours.
    — Stephanie Foden, National Geographic, 18 Mar. 2019
  • In the small hours of 29 November 2019, a young man was captured on CCTV jumping from a fifth-floor flat on Millbank on the Thames.
    — The Week Uk, TheWeek, 30 Apr. 2026
  • Frenetic, handheld scenes of Jordan’s friends guzzling handles of Tito’s at house parties give way to impressionistic passages of those same friends walking through a local nature preserve or pumping gas in the small hours before daylight.
    — Dana Harris-Bridson, IndieWire, 4 Aug. 2025
  • Opened in the 1970s by Prince Alfonso as a luxury apartment complex, it is oriented toward the indulgent pleasures of high-end dining, upscale shopping, and nights that stretch into the small hours.
    — Staff Author, Travel + Leisure, 2 July 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'small hours.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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