nightmare
/ˈnaɪt.mɛɚ/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.19 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A very unpleasant or frightening dream.
noun
Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.
noun
A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
Archaic
noun
A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis.
Example Sentences
- "I had a nightmare that I tried to run but could neither move nor breathe."
- "July 18 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Riseshttp://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/ With his crude potato-sack mask and fear-inducing toxins, The Scarecrow, a “psychopharmacologist” at an insane asylum, acts as a conjurer of nightmares, capable of turning his patients’ most terrifying anxieties against them."
- "Cleaning up after identity theft can be a nightmare of phone calls and letters."
- "If Euston is not typically English, St. Pancras is. Its façade is a nightmare of improbable Gothic. It is fairly plastered with the aesthetic ideals of 1868, and the only beautiful thing about it is Barlow's roof. It is haunted by the stuffier kind of ghost. Yet there is something about the ordered whole of St. Pancras that would make demolition a terrible pity."
- "The Red Holocaust is best interpreted in this light as the bitter fruit of an^([sic]) utopian gambit that was socially misengineered into a dystopic nightmare by despots in humanitarian disguise."
- "It haunted me, however, more than once, like a night-mare."
Etymology
From Middle English nyghtmare, from Old English *nihtmare, equivalent to night + mare (“evil spirit believed to afflict a sleeping person”). Cognate with Scots nichtmare and nichtmeer, Dutch nachtmerrie, Middle Low German nachtmār, German Nachtmahr.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈnaɪt.mɛɚ/
- British English: /ˈnaɪt.mɛə/
Usage
Inflected Forms
nightmares (plural)
night-mare (alternative, obsolete)
nightmares (present, singular)
nightmaring (participle, present)
nightmared (participle, past)
nightmared (past)