Find the word definition

Crossword clues for drowse

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
drowse
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ We were content to drowse in the warm sunlight on the beach.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But the patient begins to drowse into a strange kind of sleep.
▪ Exhausted by their exercise, they were content to drowse in the sun.
▪ The two bureaucrats lay drowsing on the port and starboard cockpit seats.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Drowse

Drowse \Drowse\ (drouz), v. i. [imp. & p. p. Drowsed (drouzd); p. pr. & vb. n. Drowsing.] [AS. dr[=u]sian, dr[=u]san, to sink, become slow or inactive; cf. OD. droosen to be sleepy, fall asleep, LG. dr[=u]sen, druusken, to slumber, fall down with a noise; prob, akin to AS. dre['o]san to fall. See Dreary.] To sleep imperfectly or unsoundly; to slumber; to be heavy with sleepiness; to doze. ``He drowsed upon his couch.''
--South.

In the pool drowsed the cattle up to their knees.
--Lowell.

Drowse

Drowse \Drowse\, v. t. To make heavy with sleepiness or imperfect sleep; to make dull or stupid.
--Milton.

Drowse

Drowse \Drowse\, n. A slight or imperfect sleep; a doze.

But smiled on in a drowse of ecstasy.
--Mrs. Browning.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
drowse

1570s, probably a back-formation from drowsy. Old English had a similar word, but there is a 600-year gap. Related: Drowsed; drowsing.

Wiktionary
drowse

n. The state of being sleepy and inactive. vb. 1 (context intransitive English) To be sleepy and inactive (qualifier: also figurative). 2 (context intransitive English) To nod off; to fall asleep. 3 (context transitive English) To advance drowsily. (qualifier: Used especially in the phrase "drowse one's way" ⇒ sleepily make one's way.) 4 (context transitive English) To make heavy with sleepiness or imperfect sleep; to make dull or stupid.

WordNet
drowse

n. a light fitful sleep [syn: doze]

drowse
  1. v. sleep lightly or for a short period of time [syn: snooze, doze]

  2. be on the verge of sleeping; "The students were drowsing in the 8 AM class"

Usage examples of "drowse".

A soft mist rounded off all the bogland, holding in a drowse the sunbeams that steeped it, and letting them waken to their full golden glory at the very heart of noon.

You could hear the gully hens-them singing cocorico, and the guinea lizards-them just a-relax in the sun hot and drowse.

He knocked on the steel door happily loudly, seeing it all in his mind suddenly, how it would be then, some sturdy 403 Li little permanent post that drowsed along from day to day, like Jefferson Barracks or Fort Riley, with solid brick barracks and new-cut grass and well kept walks under the long afternoon shadows of big old oak trees that had been standing in the same place since before George Armstrong Custer had his hair cut by the Sioux, that would be the kind of place to re-enlist for, where the NCO quarters were brick too and not this jerrybuilt ship lathe they have here, and where you can take her right into a community and a little society that the married noncoms made and maintained for themselves alone.

Khouri curl into a nearly invisible ball, and roused the hags drowsing in the crevices of his throne, snapping the guards around the perimeter of the Hall to attention.

In a word, if Vancouver had not gone up as far as Norfolk Sound or Sitka, the Russian fur traders would have drowsed on with Kadiak as headquarters, and Canada to-day might have included the entire gold-fields of Alaska.

We flung ourselves down in dappling birch shade, fed again from our kills, and drowsed off.

Dona Elizabete drowsed on a chaise longue in the dappled shade of palms and one huge monkeypod tree.

It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion.

Under their emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malay fishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the Indies.

There, drowsing by the fire, was a tall lovely Titaness named Maia, whom he had seen before in the garden on Olympus.

The Marquis wiped his perspiring hands on his trousers, walked through the door, and found himself under a canopy of yellow bellflowers and hanging ferns on an outdoor terrace that overlooked all the church towers, the red tile roofs of the principal houses, the dovecotes drowsing in the heat, the military fortifications outlined against the glass sky, the burning sea.

After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very point of being a solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was that?

In twenty-four hours he would be in a farmhouse which smelt of paraffin and beeswax and good cooking, looking out on a green valley with a shallow brown stream tumbling in riffles and drowsing in pools under banks of yellow bent.

The fat huckster-women drowsing beside their wares, scarce send their voices beyond the borders of their broadbrimmed straw hats, as they softly haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip together.

General Raseth had fallen asleep at the table, drowsing over his empty wine cup.