Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. (context idiomatic English) A short sleep, an extra sleep, a nap.
WordNet
n. a short sleep (usually not in bed) [syn: nap, catnap, cat sleep, short sleep, snooze]
Wikipedia
Forty Winks is an animated short film made by the Pat Sullivan Studio, and is among the Felix the Cat shorts.
Forty Winks is a 1925 American comedy silent film directed by Paul Iribe and Frank Urson and written by Bertram Millhauser. The film stars Raymond Griffith, Theodore Roberts, Cyril Chadwick, William Boyd and Anna May Wong. The film was released on February 2, 1925, by Paramount Pictures.
The film is presumed lost.
Usage examples of "forty winks".
As soon as they jump out of the airplane they'll probably start daydreaming about their girlfriends, take a few hits from their pocket flasks, catch forty winks, and before you know it they'll all pile into the ground at a couple of hundred miles an hour!
Fond of a concertina and pairs passing when she's had her forty winks for supper after kanekannan and abbely dimpling and is in her merlin chair assotted, reading her Evening World.
It was getting on toward winter, and I didn't have no overcoat, so I just kind of burrowed into the hay and decided to catch a quick thirty or forty winks.
With us here on the lip of it, I'd be lucky to get the old forty winks.
It means you treat this place as somewhere to study rather than a place to get forty winks.
He looked sleepy, as if he was somewhat bored by the whole proceedings, yet Morton knew he loved people to think him lazy, a good-for-nothing slouch, who spent his days in slumber and his nights catching forty winks.