Vespers is the evening prayer service in some Christian churches — chiefly Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican ones, and especially in monasteries and convents, where the monks or nuns gather at the end of the day to sing and pray. It sits in a daily timetable of services, so a monastery might hold morning prayer, midday prayer, then vespers as the light goes. The form is odd: it ends in -s and looks plural, but people treat it as one thing — *vespers is at six*, and you *go to vespers* or *sing vespers*, with no *the* and no *a*. Composers have written famous settings of the text, so you will also meet the word on concert programmes, as in Monteverdi's *Vespers* or Rachmaninoff's *All-Night Vigil*, which contains it. Outside religious and musical contexts the word is rare, and many English speakers know it only as "the evening one".