Word.ws English Dictionary

nod off

nod off verb: to fall asleep, especially unintentionally.

Verb

nod off (third-person singular simple present nods off, present participle nodding off, simple past and past participle nodded off)

  1. (idiomatic, intransitive) To fall asleep, especially unintentionally.
    • The old lady nodded off to sleep many times during the narration, only waking up when George paused, saying it was most interesting.1857–1859, W[illiam] M[akepeace] Thackeray, chapter 53, in The Virginians. A Tale of the Last Century, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury & Evans, […], published 1858–1859...
    • I dragged him to the house, / And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke. / I tried to make him talk about his travels. / Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.c. 1905–1906 (date written), Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”, in The Poems of Robert Frost: […], New York, N.Y.: The Modern Library, published 1946, →OCLC, page 38

nod off meaning in Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam and Arabic

nod off in Tamil

துயில் கொள்

nod off in Bengali

to nod off, to drowse, to doze
উঙ্ঘানো uṅghanō

nod off in Malayalam

doze off, fall asleep, go to sleep
തലതൂങ്ങുക, ഉറക്കം തുങ്ങുക, ഉറങ്ങിപ്പോകുക, ഉറങ്ങുക, മോകരിക്കുക, മയങ്ങുക

nod off in Arabic

fall asleep
نَامَ عَلَى نَفْسِهِ nāma ʕalā nafsihi

Synonyms of nod off

1 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of nod off

Forms of nod off

third-person singular presentnods off
present participlenodding off
past participlenodded off
pastnodded off

Questions about nod off

What does nod off mean?
Nod off means to fall asleep, especially unintentionally.
What is nod off in Tamil?
Nod off in Tamil is துயில் கொள். See Nod off meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is nod off?
Nod off is a verb.
What is the past tense of nod off?
The past tense of nod off is nodded off.

Words near nod off in the dictionary

  1. nocuous
  2. nocuously
  3. nocuousness
  4. nod
  5. nod in
  6. nod off
  7. nod out
  8. nod through
  9. nod-back
  10. nod-backs
  11. Noda

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nod off (page history and authors); nod off (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); উঙ্ঘানো (Bengali) (page history and authors); nod off (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-nod off.ogg.

Cite this entry: “nod off.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nod_off. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.