sleeping

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈsliːpɪŋ/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːpɪŋ

Verb

sleeping

1. present participle of sleep
   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 20, in The China Governess^[1]:

     ‘No. I only opened the door a foot and put my head in. The street lamps shine into that room. I could see him. He was all right. Sleeping like a great grampus. Poor, poor chap.’

Adjective

sleeping (not comparable)

1. Asleep.
   • 2013 July 19, Ian Sample, “Irregular bedtimes may affect children's brains”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 6, page 34:

     Irregular bedtimes may disrupt healthy brain development in young children, according to a study of intelligence and sleeping habits.  ¶ Going to bed at a different time each night affected girls more than boys, but both fared worse on mental tasks than children who had a set bedtime, researchers found.

2. Used for sleep; used to produce sleep.

Derived terms

Terms derived from sleeping (adj)

• sleeping bag
• Sleeping Beauty
• sleeping car

• sleeping hours
• sleeping pill

• sleeping policeman
• sleeping room

Translations

asleep — see asleep

used for sleep; used to produce sleep

• German: Schlaf- (de) (prefix)

• Russian: спа́льный (ru) m (spálʹnyj)

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.

Translations to be checked

• Esperanto: ^{(please verify)} dormanta

• Latvian: iemidzis m, iemigusi f, guļam-

Noun

sleeping (countable and uncountable, plural sleepings)

1. The state of being asleep, or an instance of this.
   • c. 1380, William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, I:

     And as I lay and lened and loked in the wateres / I slombred in a slepyng, it swyved so merye.

   • 1995, Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (page 144)

     […] there are no words to describe the way she negotiated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings.

Translations

state or act of being asleep

• Catalan: dormint m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 睡眠 (zh) (shuìmián)

• Finnish: nukkuminen (fi)
• French: sommeil (fr) m
• German: Schlaf (de) m

• Japanese: 睡眠 (ja) (すいみん, suimin), 眠り (ねむり, nemuri)
• Latvian: gulēšana f
• Polish: spanie (pl) n
• Portuguese: sono (pt) m, dormida f
• Russian: сон (ru) m (son)
• Spanish: durmiendo (es) m

Anagrams

• peelings, speeling

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French

Noun

sleeping m (plural sleepings)

1. sleeping car

Synonyms

• wagon-lit

Further reading

• “sleeping” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).