Word.ws English Dictionary

falling asleep

falling asleep is the present participle and gerund 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

Noun

falling asleep (uncountable)

  1. (capitalized, often, Eastern Orthodoxy) Synonym of dormition.
    Synonyms:
    dormition

Synonyms of falling asleep

Questions about falling asleep

What does falling asleep mean?
Falling asleep means synonym of dormition.
What is falling asleep the present participle and gerund of?
Falling asleep is the present participle and gerund of fall asleep.
What part of speech is falling asleep?
Falling asleep is a noun.

Words near falling asleep in the dictionary

  1. falling action
  2. falling actions
  3. falling among
  4. falling apart
  5. falling around
  6. falling asleep
  7. falling asleep in the Lord
  8. falling at the final hurdle
  9. falling at the last hurdle
  10. falling away
  11. falling back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: falling 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: “falling asleep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/falling_asleep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.