dawn
/dɔːn
/- She pushed the horse faster, but didn't sit up until the first light of dawn rose over the horizon.
- All observations of mating behavior commenced at the beginning of this dawn period.
- She wakes up in those dawns and rises with the sun.
Synonyms
- Driving through a land which has been intensively farmed since the dawn of civilisation, we soon reached the Ghab, a rich agricultural valley which had once been marshland.
- Humans require new dawns, fresh starts, ends of eras.
- If we are correct, the Late Devonian wood problem was an almost inevitable result of evolutionary developments at the dawn of life.
Synonyms
- On a day such as this, one might have hoped that the day would dawn bright and early, bringing sunshine and crisp, cold, blue skies.
- I kept the doors and windows closed even after day had dawned.
- The next day dawned late, and we set out across an inland sea - the giant frozen lake Kuttijarvi - so large we couldn't see other side.
Synonyms
- To be sure the threat to the Pattern has existed for the past couple of years, but I never thought the day would dawn when the outgoing committee was left with no alternative but to call it a day.
- A new age was dawning, and I was riding the crest of it.
- A new age has dawned, and the Holy Spirit has been poured out in a new way.
Synonyms
- Realization seemed to dawn on Kaya's face after that sentence.
- It didn't dawn on us what the reader was really asking.
- Much of this has yet to dawn on Labour's backbenches and few would understand it even if spelled out for them.
Synonyms
Origin
Late 15th century (as a verb): back-formation from Middle English dawning.
day from Old English:
The ancient word day has a Germanic root which may have meant ‘to burn’, through association with the heat of summer. The working day came with increasing industrialization, in the early 19th century. This is the day you refer to if you call it a day, ‘decide to stop doing something’. In the mid 19th century, when working people had fewer holidays, the expression was to call it half a day. If something unusual is all in a day's work, it is taken in your stride, as part of your normal routine. Jonathan Swift's Polite Conversations, which mocked the clichés of 18th-century society, suggest that the phrase was in circulation even then. Daylight dawned in the early Middle Ages (LME dawn itself is closely related to ‘day’). It was always associated with seeing, and in the mid 18th century daylights appeared as a term for the eyes. This is not the meaning in to beat the living daylights out of someone, where ‘daylights’ are the vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, and liver (see light). The word ‘living’ is a later addition to the phrase, from the late 19th century. Days of wine and roses are times of pleasure, which will inevitably pass. The phrase comes from a line in a poem by the 19th-century poet Ernest Dowson: ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses’.
Rhymes
- West Endism
- West Endy
- westen sea
- wester
- westering
- westerliness
- westerling
- westerly
- westermost
- western
- Western American
- Western Approaches
- Western Australia
- Western Australian
- Western blot
- western bluebird
- western-born
- western brown snake
- Western Cape
- Western Church
- Western Empire
- westerner
- Western European
- Western European Union
- Western Front