Word.ws English Dictionary

fallen asleep

fallen asleep is the past participle of fall asleep.

Meaning of fall asleep

Verb

fall asleep (third-person singular simple present falls asleep, present participle falling asleep, simple past fell asleep, past participle fallen asleep)

  1. To pass from a state of wakefulness into sleep.
    • She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered by the grotesquerie of some half-remembered dream in contrast with the harshness of inclement fact, drowsily realizing that since she had fallen asleep it had come on to rain smartly out of a shrouded sky.1914 November, Louis Joseph Vance, “An Outsider […]”, in Munsey’s Magazine, volume LIII, number II, New York, N.Y.: The Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Company, […], published 1915, →OCLC, chapter II...
    Synonyms:
    drift off
  2. (figuratively, idiomatic) To be affected by paresthesia; to go numb.
    • My left leg has fallen asleep!
  3. (euphemistic, poetic) To die (often seen on gravestones).
    • And he kneeled downe, and cried with a loud voice, Lord lay not this sinne to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleepe. And Saul was consenting vnto his death.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Acts 7:60

Questions about fallen asleep

What is fallen asleep the past participle of?
Fallen asleep is the past participle of fall asleep.

Words near fallen asleep in the dictionary

  1. fallen angels
  2. fallen apart
  3. fallen arch
  4. fallen arches
  5. fallen around
  6. fallen asleep
  7. fallen asleep in the Lord
  8. fallen at the final hurdle
  9. fallen at the last hurdle
  10. fallen away
  11. fallen back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fallen asleep (page history and authors); fall asleep (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: “fallen asleep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fallen_asleep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.