night fear

plural night fears · alternative nightfear · alternative night-fear

1. uncountableThe fear of the night, nighttime, or darkness.

   As the twenty-first century dawns, humanity is beginning to recover from its night-fear.

   2013, Greogory L. Matloff, Deep-Space Probes, page 25

   3 more examples

   […] just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood — what luck! — never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, cold lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; […]

   1983, Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions

   At night, the sounds were different, no less pitiful. Screams from nightmare and nightfear.

   2004, Gail Sidonie Sobat, A Winter's Tale, page 101

   All this time, O thanks to worldcasts on the gloopy TV and, more, lewdies' night-fear through lack of night-police, dead lay the street.

   1962, Anthony Burgess, edited by Andrew Biswell, A Clockwork Orange, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, published 2012, →ISBN, page 66

   Synonyms: nightfright, noctophobia, nyctophobia

2. countablefigurativelyliteralA fear or terror that one typically has at night.

   A new form of fear within me—the real night-fear of the unknown, my honest doubt as to whether we would survive.

   2014, Barry Blanchard, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains

   1 more example

   It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation.

   1917, Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, page 251