Word.ws English Dictionary

sleep-eat

sleep-eat verb: to eat in one's sleep; to eat while asleep.

Verb

sleep-eat (third-person singular simple present sleep-eats, present participle sleep-eating, simple past sleep-ate, past participle sleep-eaten)

  1. (intransitive) To eat in one's sleep; to eat while asleep.
    • Females are more than twice as likely as males to sleep-eat.2008, Don H. Hockenbury, Sandra E. Hockenbury, Psychology, Macmillan Publishers, →ISBN, page 165
    • "He's not the only one who needs it. Mom's been sleep-eating." "What? What do you mean?" I listened in disbelief as she said she'd come out into the kitchen no fewer than three times in the last couple of months and seen Betty with her hand in the breadbox.2014, Stephan Eirik Clark, Sweetness #9, →ISBN

Examples of sleep-eat in a sentence

  • Topiramate has been described as being particularly efficacious in people who sleep-eat as their non-REM parasomnia.2015, Himender Makker, Matthew Walker, Hugh Selsick, Oxford Case Histories in Sleep Medicine, →ISBN:
  • Because he was diabetic he'd sleep-eat in bed.2015, Kelly Carlin, A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up with George, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN:
  • I must've done what Liam used to do as a kid: sleep-eat in the middle of the night and deny it in the morning.2016, Dima Zales, Anna Zaires, Limbo: The Last Humans: Book 2, Mozaika Publications, →ISBN:
  • Recent studies showed that some patients experienced sleep-eating, where they would dream about food and in their drugged-induced coma, they would actually get up to prepare a meal.2016, Kathie Johnson, The First Storm, AuthorHouse, →ISBN:

Forms of sleep-eat

third-person singular presentsleep-eats
present participlesleep-eating
pastsleep-ate
past participlesleep-eaten
alternative formsleepeat

Origin of sleep-eat

From sleep + eat; by analogy of sleepwalk.

Questions about sleep-eat

What does sleep-eat mean?
Sleep-eat means to eat in one's sleep; to eat while asleep.
How do you use sleep-eat in a sentence?
Topiramate has been described as being particularly efficacious in people who sleep-eat as their non-REM parasomnia.
What part of speech is sleep-eat?
Sleep-eat is a verb.
What is the past tense of sleep-eat?
The past tense of sleep-eat is sleep-ate.

Words near sleep-eat in the dictionary

  1. sleep with the fishes
  2. sleep-at-noon
  3. sleep-ate
  4. sleep-deprived
  5. sleep-drunk
  6. sleep-eat
  7. sleep-eaten
  8. sleep-eating
  9. sleep-eats
  10. sleep-flower
  11. sleep-flowers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sleep-eat (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-sleep-eat.wav.

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