Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "pre-dawn".
It is only in this latter epoch that the perfect sky-ground correlation is attained, at the heliacal rising of Leo, when the Sphinx would have gazed directly at his own celestial counterpart in the pre-dawn.
Even in daytime it is a lonely and desolate spot, but in the pre-dawn moonlight it becomes charged with a sinister atmosphere of its own that can be felt by even the most cynical and unsuperstitious realist.
The pirate armada watched as the Columbian coast lit up, explosions sending fiery debris high into the pre-dawn sky.
A pre-dawn blue filled the Valle, and in the distance the higher peaks of the Jemez were flagged with mist.
Their one surviving plasma rifle walked its fire across the slope, painting the pre-dawn dark with brief, terrible sunrises, and he could hear the shrieks of wounded and dying pirates even through the thunder of battle as the wave of attackers shredded under that savage pounding.
He followed Lee through the pre-dawn darkness of his suite in Tomblecity, Cassida, and into the garden lounge.
Last but not least, we have seen how the ancient Egyptians of the Pyramid Age particularly observed the Duat as it lay along the eastern horizon in the pre-dawn at the time of the summer solstice.
That had been removed as soon as the body was safely inside the church and the doors closed, to be replaced by another one bearing the MacRorie arms, Cathan's label of cadency stitched to it lovingly in the pre-dawn hours by his sister Evaine.
It's in the way the Dixie cups and crumpled cigarette packs blow across the tarmac in the pre-dawn wind.
The world was bathed in that milky pre-dawn light that seems to come from nowhere.
Then he drove to a street corner in Liberty City, where two crack dealers had done the planet a tremendous favor by killing each other in a pre-dawn shootout.
It was already pre-dawn, Before Morning Nautical Twilight as they'd say in the military, with the air a ghostly blue.
He could smell delicious odors and realized that he had had very little to eat since that pre-dawn stale bread and coffee.
As we clattered down the stairs, uniform hats clutched under our arms, cadets from the other floors joined us until we spilled out of our dormitory to join a green-clad flood of students cascading onto the parade ground in the dimness of pre-dawn.
Portly pursuer of pre-dawn pissery, self, rising early to dispose of excess beer drunk night before, found same on doorstep before sunrise.