Curfew refers to a law or order that requires people to be indoors after a certain time at night, as well as to the period of time when such an order or law is in effect. Chiefly in the United States, curfew is also used to refer to the time set by a parent or caregiver at which a child has to be back home after going out.

// No one is allowed on the streets during the curfew.

// Lana has a 10 o’clock curfew, so we need to bring her home right after the movie.

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“[Lew] Alcindor narrowed his college choice to Michigan, Columbia, St. John’s, and UCLA. He liked Columbia as the chance to attend school walking distance to Harlem and a subway ride to the jazz clubs he had to leave early as a high schooler to make curfew.” — Scott Howard-Cooper, Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty, 2024

Curfews set by parents (and kept or broken by their offspring) do not echo the origins of the word curfew in any discernable way—if they did, they’d need to at least hint at the sound of a bell. When curfew was first used in the 14th century, it referred to the sounding of a bell at evening to alert people that they should cover their hearth fires for the night—a necessary warning, as many European houses in the Middle Ages were close enough to each other that fires could spread easily from one to the next. The word came to English from Anglo-French, in which the signal was called coverfeu, a compound of covrir, meaning “to cover,” and feu, “fire.” Even when hearth fires were no longer regulated, many towns had other rules that called for ringing an evening bell, including one that required people to be off the streets by a given time, a development that granted curfew permission to go out and about with a broader meaning.