[j. d. worthington]

"Nite" is one of those holdovers from one of the "simplified spelling" movements of the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, connected to journalism (where it still crops up, occasionally but rarely... though it used to be quite common in some newspapers); along with use of "z" for "surprise", "compromise", etc., which one sees periodically, especially in writing before about 1940 (most of the strong adherents of the movement began to finally let it go about then, though not entirely). Several of the pulp magazines used this for a while, along with some of the others. It was a sort of half-baked attempt to go with a more phonetic spelling, setting etymology of the words aside....