nightmare – English noun declension

English noun forms of nightmare

Noun: nightmare
Singularnightmare
Pluralnightmares

Sample Sentences

  • I had a nightmare that I tried to run but could neither move nor breathe.
  • July 18 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Dark Knight Riseshttp://www.avclub.com/articles/the-dark-knight-rises-review-batman,82624/
  • 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.
  • Cleaning up after identity theft can be a nightmare of phone calls and letters.
  • If Euston is not typically English, St. Pancras is. Its façade is a nightmare of improbable Gothic. It is fairly plastered with the aesthetic ideals of 1868, and the only beautiful thing about it is Barlow's roof. It is haunted by the stuffier kind of ghost. Yet there is something about the ordered whole of St. Pancras that would make demolition a terrible pity. [1941 August, C. Hamilton Ellis, “The English Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 358:]
  • The Red Holocaust is best interpreted in this light as the bitter fruit of an^([sic]) utopian gambit that was socially misengineered into a dystopic nightmare by despots in humanitarian disguise. [2009, Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust, page 240:]
  • It haunted me, however, more than once, like a night-mare. [1817 December 31 (indicated as 1818), [Walter Scott], chapter II, in Rob Roy. […], volume I, Edinburgh: […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co. […]; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC, page 46:]
  • They plague and annoy lazy men-servants and untidy maids with frightful dreams; oppress them as the nightmare; bite them as fleas; and scratch and tear them like cats and dogs; and often in the night frighten, in the shape of owls, thieves and lovers, or, like Will-o-the-wisps, lead them astray into bogs and marshes, and perhaps up to those who are in pursuit of them. [1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 283:]
  • I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart! [1843, Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat:]
  • The Night-mare generally ſeizes people ſleeping on their backs, and often begins with frightful dreams, which are ſoon ſucceeded by a difficult reſpiration, a violent oppreſſion on the breaſt, and a total privation of voluntary motion. [1753, John Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, London: Printed for D. Wilson and T. Durham, at Plato’s Head, in the Strand, page 2:]
  • Had been afflicted in the night with that strange complaint called the nightmare. [1792, James Boswell, in Danziger & Brady (eds.), Boswell: The Great Biographer (Journals 1789–1795), Yale 1989, p. 209]

Etymology

From Middle English nyghtmare, 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. See: Middle English Nouns 'nyghtmare', Old English Nouns '*nihtmare', Dutch Nouns 'nachtmerrie', German Nouns 'Nachtmahr'.

Verbs referencing "nightmare"

Finnish Nouns mara, German Nouns Mahr.