unslept

English

Etymology

un- +‎ slept

Adjective

unslept (not comparable)

1. Not having been slept.
   • 2010, Marcus Berkmann, Zimmer Men: The Trials and Tribulations of the Ageing Cricketer:

     As you stagger in, your eyes struggling to focus, your throat claggy with sleep unslept, you might expect it to be more or less deserted, save for the odd bomb-disposal squad blowing up someone's lost suitcase.

   • 2011, Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, pages 82 - 83:

     And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, "What's the sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'

   • 2011, Donvé Lee, An Intimate War, page 116:

     My eyes burn from sleep unslept and from tears unshed. I long for oblivion. I am impossibly tired.

2. Not having been slept (in, on, with, etc.); usually with a preposition.
   • 1957, Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine:

     The high-tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat above the unslept houses.

   • 1972, Monica Dickens, World's End in Winter:

     Tom's room was empty, the bed unslept in.

   • 2008, Marie Hilton, Eye of the Soul:

     For a whole lifetime With no guaranties And promises not kept How ever hard you try to please All the nights unslept

   • 2009, H.L. Humes, The Underground City: A Novel, page 721:

     Awakened to the lighted room by the rining telephone beside her bed, she reached across the vacant unslept pillow and glanced automatically at the clock—the book she'd been reading slid sideways off the coverlet in a spill of pages onto the floor.

3. Not having slept; sleep-deprived.
   • 2010, Aidan Chambers, The Toll Bridge:

     Dawn of a new day, me unslept from the old, a refugee from the night.

   • 2012, James Hamilton-Paterson, Rancid Pansies:

     Hollow-eyed, unslept and unshaven, I was by no means my usual neatly groomed self when the following day Virgilio, my friend in the carabinieri, arranged for a helicopter to fly me over the scene.

   • 2012, Ned Boulting, How I Won the Yellow Jumper: Dispatches from the Tour de France:

     In recent years, Mathieu has risen to prominence in ASO. He is the unshaven, unslept, pastis-guzzling chain-smoking doyen of the press.

   • 2013, Carl Shuker, Anti Lebanon: A Novel, page 183:

     He received his room key from the owner, a shambling, unslept oaf named Ali, and as he passed he offered the young Japanese a rough acknowledgement the way the young men do —"Auss" — on the way to his double room with its two single beds and ants all over the floor.

Verb

unslept

1. simple past and past participle of unsleep

Anagrams

• n-tuples, penults, puntels, unspelt