Word.ws English Dictionary

dorveille

dorveille noun: a dreamlike semi-conscious state, such as while falling asleep or waking up, between periods of sleep, or from exhaustion; generally with reference to an altered mental state where there is no distinction between the fantastic and the familiar.

Noun

dorveille (uncountable)

  1. (literary) A dreamlike semi-conscious state, such as while falling asleep or waking up, between periods of sleep, or from exhaustion; generally with reference to an altered mental state where there is no distinction between the fantastic and the familiar.
    • [Lancelot] has witnessed the miraculous cure of his fellow knight, but he understands nothing of what he has seen in his somnolent dorveille.2000, Anne Marie D'Arcy, Wisdom and the Grail, page 90
    • The poetic voice describes how, sleepless with lovesickness, he goes to the chapel, seeking respite. As he meditates there upon the cause of his "passion", he […] enters into a state of dorveille and has a vision populated with women2008, Emily Francomano, Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature, page 71

Examples of dorveille in a sentence

  • dorveille is a peculiar psychic, physical, and spiritual condition traditionally suffered by the narrator or human protagonist of the allegorical poem.2009, James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, page 94:
  • the narrator is in a dreamlike state midway between sleep and wakefulness, […] "dorveille", a state that accentuates the inability to tell whether the events being recounted really happened or not.2010, Christine de Pizan, David Hult, Debate of the Romance of the Rose, page 106:
  • During this dorveille, or “wake-sleep,” people got up to pee, hung out by the fire, had sex, or prayed.2022 January 27, Derek Thompson, “Can Medieval Sleeping Habits Fix America’s Insomnia?”, in The Atlantic:

Origin of dorveille

Borrowed from Middle French dorveille.

Questions about dorveille

What does dorveille mean?
Dorveille means a dreamlike semi-conscious state, such as while falling asleep or waking up, between periods of sleep, or from exhaustion; generally with reference to an altered mental state where there is no distinction between the fantastic and the familiar.
How do you use dorveille in a sentence?
dorveille is a peculiar psychic, physical, and spiritual condition traditionally suffered by the narrator or human protagonist of the allegorical poem.
What part of speech is dorveille?
Dorveille is a noun.

Words near dorveille in the dictionary

  1. doru
  2. dorus
  3. DORV
  4. Dorval
  5. Dorval Island
  6. dorveille
  7. dorvelleid
  8. Dorvil
  9. dorvilleid
  10. dorvilleids
  11. Dorvils

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dorveille (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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