Word.ws English Dictionary

sleeping dragon

sleeping dragon noun: a tube-shaped device that protesters attach their hands to on the inside, particularly in order to attach themselves to a large object so that they cannot easily be removed from an area.

sleeping dragon: a tube-shaped device that protesters attach their hands to on the inside, particularly in order to...
Image: Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

sleeping dragon (plural sleeping dragons)

  1. A tube-shaped device that protesters attach their hands to on the inside, particularly in order to attach themselves to a large object so that they cannot easily be removed from an area.
    • More ambitious acts include locking themselves to one another or to special devices, including a "sleeping dragon," a pipe cemented into a road bed into which the protestors can lock their arms.[2000 September, Thomas R. King, “Managing Protests on Public Land”, in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, →ISSN, page 11
    • The blockade was centered around four college students forming a human chain, their hands encased in containers of hardened cement, the old sleeping dragon trick.2009, Mike Roselle, Josh Mahan, Tree Spiker, page 245

Examples of sleeping dragon in a sentence

  • Figure 5.1 depicts a small example of tactical technology called a sleeping dragon.[2014, Hank Johnston, What is a Social Movement?:
  • According to a Morton County peace officer's affidavit, filed with the state of North Dakota, "[Daniel T'seleie] used a sleeping dragon device to secure himself," […]2016 September 21, Mark Rendell, “'We're protectors, we're not protesters:' Northerner talks about Dakota arrest”, in CBC News:
  • The Hubbard county sheriff’s office sent a “code red” to the Beltrami county field force extrication team, which had received training from 2016 to 2020 to remove protesters who used sleeping dragons.2021 October 5, Hilary Beaumont, “Revealed: pipeline company paid Minnesota police for arresting and surveilling protesters”, in The...

Forms of sleeping dragon

pluralsleeping dragons

Questions about sleeping dragon

What does sleeping dragon mean?
Sleeping dragon means a tube-shaped device that protesters attach their hands to on the inside, particularly in order to attach themselves to a large object so that they cannot easily be removed from an area.
How do you use sleeping dragon in a sentence?
Figure 5.1 depicts a small example of tactical technology called a sleeping dragon.
What part of speech is sleeping dragon?
Sleeping dragon is a noun.
What is the plural of sleeping dragon?
The plural of sleeping dragon is sleeping dragons.

Words near sleeping dragon in the dictionary

  1. sleeping cars
  2. sleeping dictionaries
  3. sleeping dictionary
  4. sleeping draft
  5. sleeping drafts
  6. sleeping dragon
  7. sleeping dragons
  8. sleeping draught
  9. sleeping draughts
  10. sleeping funny
  11. sleeping giant

Source and license

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