Word.ws English Dictionary

pnigalion

pnigalion noun: a nocturnal monster in Ancient Greece that would choke its victims; incubus; nightmare.

Noun

pnigalion (uncountable)

  1. (historical) A nocturnal monster in Ancient Greece that would choke its victims; incubus; nightmare.
    • Because the Greeks considered being choked or strangled to be one consequence of a night-mare attack, the entity was also called pnigalion (“throttler”).2011, Shelley R. Adler, Sleep Paralysis, page 41
    • Their guest list of night-time intruders includes: […] the Greek ephialtes ( one who leaps upon ) , mora ( the night 'mare' or monster), pnigalion ( the choker ) and barychnas (the heavy breather); […]2012, Arthur Goldstuck, The Ghost That Closed Down The Town
  2. (archaic) sleep paralysis; nightmare
    • Incubus (synonyms, Pnigalion, ephialtes, epibole ) .— It is an elementary form of epilepsy .1936, James Richard Whitwell, Historical Notes on Psychiatry, page 170
    • Themison names it pnigalion, from the Greek word for suffocating.1991, George Mora, Benjamin G. Kohl, Witches, Devils, and Doctors in the Renaissance

Examples of pnigalion in a sentence

  • Greeks had the pnigalion (the choker) and the barychnas (the heavy breather) troubling the sleepers (Keissling, 1977).2015, Nandita Chaube, Spirituality and Human Psyche:
  • It was not merely unconsciousness, it was as if the mind were being smothered by some malign force, a pnigalion, throttling restfulness into a state of paralysis.2022, Lucas Lex DeJong, Unmapped Darkness: The Journals of the Red Raider:

Origin of pnigalion

From New Latin pnīgalion, from Ancient Greek πνῑγαλίων (pnīgalíōn, “nightmare”), from πνῑ́γω (pnī́gō, “to throttle, strangle”).

Questions about pnigalion

What does pnigalion mean?
Pnigalion means a nocturnal monster in Ancient Greece that would choke its victims; incubus; nightmare.
How do you use pnigalion in a sentence?
Greeks had the pnigalion (the choker) and the barychnas (the heavy breather) troubling the sleepers (Keissling, 1977).
What part of speech is pnigalion?
Pnigalion is a noun.

Words near pnigalion in the dictionary

  1. pnictides
  2. pnictogen
  3. pnictogenide
  4. pnictogenides
  5. pnictogens
  6. pnigalion
  7. Pnina
  8. PNK
  9. PNL
  10. PNLs
  11. PNM

Source and license

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