Word.ws English Dictionary

biphasic sleep

biphasic sleep noun: the practice of sleeping twice per night, interrupted by a period of wakefulness; common in the days before electric lighting during the season with longer night.

Noun

biphasic sleep (uncountable)

  1. The practice of sleeping twice per night, interrupted by a period of wakefulness; common in the days before electric lighting during the season with longer night.
    • Beginning in the 1700s, the industrial revolution—its light, its caffeine, its clocks, and above all, its work schedules—took Europe’s biphasic sleep in its hairy arms and mushed the two phases together.2022 January 27, Derek Thompson, “Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?”, in The Atlantic
  2. The practice of taking a regular nap during the afternoon and sleeping fewer hours at night.

Questions about biphasic sleep

What does biphasic sleep mean?
Biphasic sleep means the practice of sleeping twice per night, interrupted by a period of wakefulness; common in the days before electric lighting during the season with longer night.
What part of speech is biphasic sleep?
Biphasic sleep is a noun.

Words near biphasic sleep in the dictionary

  1. BIPGM
  2. biphalangeal
  3. biphasal
  4. biphase
  5. biphasic
  6. biphasic sleep
  7. biphasically
  8. biphasicity
  9. biphasity
  10. biphenanthrene
  11. biphenanthrenes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: biphasic sleep (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “biphasic sleep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/biphasic_sleep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.