unsleeping
English edit
Etymology edit
Adjective edit
unsleeping (comparative more unsleeping, superlative most unsleeping)
- Not sleeping.
- 1913 October, Jack London, chapter XV, in The Valley of the Moon, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, book II, page 246:
- All that night Saxon lay, unsleeping, without taking off her clothes, and when she arose in the morning and washed her face and dressed her hair she was aware of a strange numbness, of a feeling of constriction about her head as if it were bound by a heavy band of iron.
- (figuratively) Remaining constantly alert.
- 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Quarter-deck”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 177:
- Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.
- 1887, Henry Martyn Field, From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn, page 9:
- Captain Kennedy, who is the Commodore of the fleet, and so always commands the newest and best ship of the line, is an admirable seaman, with a quick eye for everything, always on deck at critical moments, watching with unsleeping vigilance over the safety of all on board.
- 1930, Building for the Future:
- An unsleeping eye watches the steam pressure and steadily regulates the firing much more economically and patiently than the most experienced fireman.
- Remaining constantly active.
- 1996, Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands, page 9:
- Five hundred miles of moonlit fields and sleeping villages; of black towns and unsleeping furnaces; rain, fog, and frost; snow flurry and flood; tunnel and viaduct.
- 2011, Tim Bowler, River Boy:
- A shiver of cool air wafted over her and passed; and she remembered her debt, and why she had come out. She looked down at the unsleeping river.
Verb edit
unsleeping