unsleep
unsleep noun: sleeplessness; wakefulness.
Noun
unsleep (uncountable)
- Sleeplessness; wakefulness.
- The more persisting condition, however, — the blueness of months, in which anything from shoe-buttons to hair fillet, from the morning kiss to the struggle in the world's arena, from the half satisfactory day's work to the dreaded night of unsleep, is colored—is not so readily elucidated or...1893, Smith Baker, “Ocular Psychalgia”, in The American Journal of Insanity, volume 49, page 598
- I hadn't even taken time to wonder what in hell she wanted with me: only the terror after the boy put the note in my hand and I found privacy to open and read it and still (the terror) in the courage, desperation, despair—call it whatever you like and whatever it was and wherever I found it — to...1957, William Faulkner, The Town: A Novel of the Snopes Family
- A sleeplike state that is not true sleep.
- Deeper than self entirely, made transparent, The dreamer enters unsleep, a new zone, And in so doing, climbs !2004, Richard Burns, Richard Berengarten, For the Living: Longer Poems 1965-2000, page 149
- Rather than sleeping the sleep of a very drunk man, I sleep the unsleep of a wizzed out partygoer after a couple of gees too many in the company of Uncle Charles.2007, Matt Rothwell, Drunk in Charge of a Foreign Language, page 161
Verb
unsleep (third-person singular simple present unsleeps, present participle unsleeping, simple past and past participle unslept)
- To be wakeful.
- In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of a dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows. I sleep and unsleep.2002, Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
- ...the husband has not been able to learn to speak fluently the language ofhis new country; he has created a defense, as it were, against the corruption of his relief-giving memory: he reads “his Russian language newspaper”and wears over his nightgown “the old overcoat with astrakhan collar” which...2012, Yuri Leving, Anatomy of a Short Story
- To awaken; to become wakeful.
- He said: "I are sorry, but Ravager is big strong dog. He will be all right soon." […] I sat with, in case he might unsleep.1930 October, Rudyard Kipling, “Toby Dog”, in Thy Servant a Dog […], London: Macmillan and Co., […], published October 1931, →OCLC, page 91
- And you also would unsleep to this, which is not quite like awakening because you were not quite sleeping yet, neither were you drifting.2001, Michael Burkard, Unsleeping: poems, page 80
- To cause someone or something to go from a sleeping state to a wakeful one, or to deprive of sleep.
- And into this chancy sphere we have come, into playtime of desires that destroy or unsleep us.1974, Hugo Manning, This Room Before Sunrise, page 33
- I said I wanted what all guys want: to smack the beauty back into you with a light bulb revolver, to call down fire from the holy spirit and watch you incinerate in a cheap party gown, to rip you in two and make you notice how close we are to death when sleeping, to awaken that four-letter beast...2010, Derrick Brown, Born in the Year of the Butterfly Knife
Forms of unsleep
| third-person singular present | unsleeps |
|---|---|
| present participle | unsleeping |
| past participle | unslept |
| past | unslept |
Origin of unsleep
From un- + sleep.
Questions about unsleep
- What does unsleep mean?
- Unsleep means sleeplessness; wakefulness.
- What part of speech is unsleep?
- Unsleep can be a noun or a verb.
Words near unsleep in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: unsleep (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: “unsleep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/unsleep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.