Word.ws English Dictionary

incubuses

incubuses is the plural of incubus.

Meaning of incubus

Noun

incubus (plural incubi or incubuses)

  1. (mediaeval folklore) An evil spirit supposed to oppress people while asleep, especially to have sex with women as they sleep.
  2. A feeling of oppression during sleep, sleep paralysis; night terrors, a nightmare.
    • it increaseth fearful dreams, incubus, night-walking, crying out, and much unquietness […] .Burton with W.H. Gass, The Anatomy of Melancholy, NYRB Classics ser. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001, orig. 1932), vol. 1, p. 249
    Synonyms:
    nightmare
  3. (broadly) Any oppressive thing or person; a burden.
    • Again he felt the impulse of flight: but his body was a dry dead incubus that refused to obey his volition.August 1935, Clark Ashton Smith, Weird Tales, "The Treader of the Dust"
  4. One of various of parasitic insects, especially subfamily Aphidiinae.

Questions about incubuses

What is incubuses the plural of?
Incubuses is the plural of incubus.

Words near incubuses in the dictionary

  1. incubing
  2. incubiture
  3. incubous
  4. incubously
  5. incubus
  6. incubuses
  7. incudal
  8. incudate
  9. incudectomy
  10. incudes
  11. incudo-

Source and license

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