Word.ws English Dictionary

dead sleeps

dead sleeps is the plural of dead sleep.

Meaning of dead sleep

Noun

dead sleep (usually uncountable, plural dead sleeps)

  1. (usually) A particularly sound sleep
  2. (usually) The first sleep of the night in a biphasic sleep pattern, before the watch.
    • Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. […] The initial interval of slumber was usually referred to as “first sleep,” or, less often, “first nap” or “dead sleep.”2001 April, A. Roger Ekirch, “Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles”, in The American Historical Review, volume 106, number 2, American Historical Association, page 364
    Synonyms:
    first sleep

Questions about dead sleeps

What is dead sleeps the plural of?
Dead sleeps is the plural of dead sleep.

Words near dead sleeps in the dictionary

  1. dead shot
  2. dead shots
  3. dead silence
  4. dead silences
  5. dead sleep
  6. dead sleeps
  7. dead soldier
  8. dead soldiers
  9. dead space
  10. dead spaces
  11. dead spot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead sleeps (page history and authors); dead 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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