serenade: [17] A serenade is strictly a ‘song sung in the evening’, but in fact historically it has nothing to do with ‘night’ – etymologically it is a ‘serene’ piece of music. The word comes via French sérénade from Italian serenata, a derivative of sereno ‘serene’. The notion of a serenata as a piece of ‘night’ music arose through association with sera ‘evening’ (a relative of French soir ‘evening’, from which English gets soirée [19]). Italian sereno came from Latin serēnus ‘bright, clear’, which also produced English serene [16]. => serene
