Word.ws English Dictionary

false dawns

false dawns is the plural of false dawn.

Meaning of false dawn

Noun

false dawn (plural false dawns)

  1. A thin ambient light which precedes true dawn, typically by around an hour, in certain parts of the world.
    • The moon was low down, and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about an hour before the real one.1888, Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills
    Synonyms:
    zodiacal light
  2. (figuratively) Something engendering premature hope; a promising sign which in fact leads to nothing.
    • As Congo nears the 50th anniversary of its independence from Belgium on June 30th, Mr Chebeya’s murky death suggests that 2006 was a false dawn.2010 June 10, “It could be a cover-up”, in The Economist

Questions about false dawns

What is false dawns the plural of?
False dawns is the plural of false dawn.

Words near false dawns in the dictionary

  1. false croups
  2. false cypress
  3. false daisy
  4. false dandelion
  5. false dawn
  6. false dawns
  7. false dichotomies
  8. false dichotomy
  9. false dilemma
  10. false dilemmas
  11. false documentaries

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: false dawns (page history and authors); false dawn (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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