Noun: incubus
| Singular | incubus |
| Plural | incubi; incubuses |
Sample Sentences
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it increaseth fearful dreams, incubus, night-walking, crying out, and much unquietness […] . [Burton with W.H. Gass, The Anatomy of Melancholy, NYRB Classics ser. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001, orig. 1932), vol. 1, p. 249]
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Again he felt the impulse of flight: but his body was a dry dead incubus that refused to obey his volition. [August 1935, Clark Ashton Smith, Weird Tales, "The Treader of the Dust"]
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Ahead of us the lowering smoke-screen of Leeds and her gloomy satellites hung like an incubus over the land. [1949 March and April, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–2”, in Railway Magazine, page 82:]
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Notions of civic virtue were at that moment changing, in ways which would make of Louis's alleged vices an incubus on the back of the monarchy. [2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, pages 132–3:]
Nouns inflected like incubus
renal calculus,
pylorus,
prolapsus,
parahippocampal gyrus,
hyperradius,
succubus,
scarabaeus,
colossus,
eucalyptus,
papyrus,
disfocus,
polypus,
phallus,
solidus,
silurus,
lenticular nucleus,
dinosaurus,
chorepiscopus,
ankylosaurus,
fusiform gyrus, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Late Latin incubus, from Latin incubō (“nightmare, one who lies down on the sleeper”), from incubō (“to lie upon, to hatch”, from in- (“on”) + cubō (“to lie down”)). See: Latin Nouns '
incubō'.