nightmare
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈnaɪt.mɛə/
ipa: /ˈnaɪt.mɛɚ/
ipa: [nʌɪʔ.mɛəɹ]
Forms: form: nightmares
form: night-mare
Etymology: From Middle English night-mare, 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.
Senses: examples: text: I had a nightmare that I tried to run but could neither move nor breathe.
text: 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.
glosses: A very unpleasant or frightening dream.
examples: text: Cleaning up after identity theft can be a nightmare of phone calls and letters.
text: 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.
ref: 1941 August, C. Hamilton Ellis, “The English Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 358:
text: 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.
ref: 2009, Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust, page 240:
glosses: Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure.
examples: text: It haunted me, however, more than once, like a night-mare.
ref: 1817 December 31 (indicated as 1818), [Walter Scott], chapter II, in Rob Roy. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co. […]; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC, page 46:
text: I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!
ref: 1843, Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat:
glosses: A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep.
examples: text: The Night-mare generally ſeizes people ſleeping on their backs, and often begins with frightful dreams, which are ſoon ſucceeded by a difficult reſpiration, a violent oppreſſion on the breaſt, and a total privation of voluntary motion.
ref: 1753, John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, London: Printed for D. Wilson and T. Durham, at Plato’s Head, in the Strand, page 2:
text: Had been afflicted in the night with that strange complaint called the nightmare.
ref: 1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 209
glosses: A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; sleep paralysis.
Synonyms: sense: demon said to torment sleepers
word: incubus
sense: demon said to torment sleepers
word: succubus
sense: demon said to torment sleepers
word: night hag
sense: demon said to torment sleepers
word: sleep paralysis
Derived terms: daymare
flightmare
frightmare
knightmare
logistical nightmare
mid-nightmare
midnightmare
morningmare
nightmare fuel
nightmarelike
nightmarious
nightmarish
nightmary
out of a nightmare