Unsleeping
adj, verb ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 past participle of unsleep form-of, participle, past
- 1 Not sleeping.
"All that night Saxon lay, unsleeping, without taking off her clothes, and when she arose in the morning and washed her face and dressed her hair she was aware of a strange numbness, of a feeling of constriction about her head as if it were bound by a heavy band of iron."
- 2 Remaining constantly alert. figuratively
"Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought."
- 3 Remaining constantly active.
"Five hundred miles of moonlit fields and sleeping villages; of black towns and unsleeping furnaces; rain, fog, and frost; snow flurry and flood; tunnel and viaduct."
- 1 fully awake wordnet
Example
More examples"All that night Saxon lay, unsleeping, without taking off her clothes, and when she arose in the morning and washed her face and dressed her hair she was aware of a strange numbness, of a feeling of constriction about her head as if it were bound by a heavy band of iron."
Etymology
From un- + sleeping.
More for "unsleeping"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.