nightmare

English Online Dictionary. What means nightmare‎? What does nightmare mean?

English

Alternative forms

• night-mare (obsolete)

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.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈnaɪt.mɛə/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈnaɪt.mɛɚ/, [nʌɪʔ.mɛəɹ]

Noun

nightmare (plural nightmares)

1. A very bad or frightening dream. [from 19th c.]
   • July 18 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Rises[1]

     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.

2. (figuratively) Any bad, miserable, difficult or terrifying situation or experience that arouses anxiety, terror, agony or great displeasure. [from 20th c.]
3. (now rare) A demon or monster, thought to plague people while they slept and cause a feeling of suffocation and terror during sleep. [from 14th c.]
4. (now chiefly historical) A feeling of extreme anxiety or suffocation experienced during sleep; Sleep paralysis. [from 16th c.]
   • 1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 209:

     Had been afflicted in the night with that strange complaint called the nightmare.

Synonyms

• (demon said to torment sleepers): incubus, succubus, night hag, sleep paralysis

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

nightmare (third-person singular simple present nightmares, present participle nightmaring, simple past and past participle nightmared)

1. (intransitive) To experience a nightmare.
2. (transitive) To imagine (someone or something) as in a nightmare.
3. (transitive) To trouble (someone or something), as by a nightmare.

See also