night-dress

plural night-dresses

1. archaicArchaic form of nightdress.

   “[…] You were very nearly dead to-night, Macumazahn.” / “Very nearly, indeed,” I answered, still panting, and arranging the rags of my night-dress round me as best I might.

   1889 December, H[enry] Rider Haggard, “[Allan’s Wife] Hendrika Plots Evil”, in Allan’s Wife and Other Tales, London: Spencer Blackett, […], →OCLC, page 163

   2 more examples

   Or if, on the contrary, we had taken a fancy for the terrible, and made the lover of the new femme de chambre a professional burglar, who bursts into the house with his band, slaughters black Sambo at the feet of his master, and carries off Amelia in her night-dress, not to be let loose again till the third volume, we should easily have constructed a tale of thrilling interest, through the fiery chapters of which the reader should hurry, panting.

   1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vauxhall”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 43

   Then, with a nod to his brother and a short word of greeting to the dauphin and to the Duc du Maine, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat in his long silken night-dress, his little white feet dangling from beneath it—a perilous position for any man to assume, were it not that he had so heart-felt a sense of his own dignity that he could not realise that under any circumstances it might be compromised in the eyes of others.

   1893, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “A Monarch in Déshabille”, in The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents, volume I, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, [part I (In the Old World)], pages 28–29