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The same with in the night, if someone said that you would think of any time between the hours of 8pm and 6am, or thereabouts. However, at night generally means the specific time between when night begins and when you go to sleep, let's say between 8pm and 10pm. It's similar with other specific times of day, such as at midnight or at noon.
The expression night-night is an example of the linguistic phenomenon reduplication. Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical derivation to create new words.
In the night is used more loosely, often in songs, poems, novels and the like to refer to the period of darkness and all that people associate with it. In the night ghouls and ghosties are about. In the night owls can be heard calling across the valley. There is also the more prosaic at night, used to refer to night time activities.
at night refers to the time of day. Some animals leave their burrows at night. It is a general term. the night can be used in a similar way, to refer to the time of day in general terms. She said she was a nocturnal animal, and that she loved the night.
To-day and to-night aren't the only words to have evolved like this. I'm aware that Ngrams can be over-used, but, in this case, I think the way these Ngrams trace the words’ evolution is rather instructive: Incidentally, the same thing happened with to-morrow as happened with to-day and to-night.
Night is from sunset to sunrise, so from 8:01 PM until 5:59 AM. This is just a general outline - it's more common to categorize these times based upon one's activities. For example, we eat breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening.
"The tiger hunts by night" sounds more dramatic than "The tiger hunts at night." Consider the title of the following film: They Drive by Night, which is a hyped-up way of presenting a movie about truck drivers who are trying to survive in their tough world. Had the film been called "They Drive at Night" it would have sounded pretty ho-hum.
"Good night" as a greeting was once a feature found almost exclusively in Ireland. In James Joyce's "The Dead", for example, it is used both as greeting: —O, Mr Conroy, said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good night, Mrs Conroy. And as a farewell:
The convention stems from the term itself. Midnight comes from 'mid-night.' In conversation, the 'night' of which 'midnight' is in the middle, is considered the night of the date mentioned. If you are referring to a deadline, this also will refer to the stroke of 12 after the evening of the same date. Example: The paper is due by Friday at ...
“Some speakers of vernacular English varieties, particularly in isolated or mountainous regions of the southern United States, use phrases such as of a night or of an evening in place of Standard English at night or in the evening, as in We’d go hunting of an evening.”