night fear

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English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From night +‎ fear.

Noun

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night fear (countable and uncountable, plural night fears)

  1. (uncountable) The fear of the night, nighttime, or darkness.
    • 1983, Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions:
      [] just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood — what luck! — never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, cold lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; []
    • 2004, Gail Sidonie Sobat, A Winter's Tale, page 101:
      At night, the sounds were different, no less pitiful. Screams from nightmare and nightfear.
    • 2012 [1962], Anthony Burgess, edited by Andrew Biswell, A Clockwork Orange, New York: W. W. Norton, →ISBN, page 66:
      All this time, O thanks to worldcasts on the gloopy TV and, more, lewdies' night-fear through lack of night-police, dead lay the street.
    • 2013, Greogory L. Matloff, Deep-Space Probes, page 25:
      As the twenty-first century dawns, humanity is beginning to recover from its night-fear.
  2. (countable, literal, figurative) A fear or terror that one typically has at night.
    • 1917, Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, page 251:
      It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation.
    • 2014, Barry Blanchard, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains:
      A new form of fear within me—the real night-fear of the unknown, my honest doubt as to whether we would survive.

Synonyms

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Anagrams

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