Meanings
plural sleep camels
- idiomaticslangA person who habitually does with little to no sleep during the week and then makes up by sleeping a lot during the weekend.
Silicon Valley has bred 'sleep camels', who store up sleep at the weekends then work long hours all week.
2001, Richard Reeves, Happy Mondays: Putting the Pleasure Back Into Work, Pearson Education Limited, →ISBN2 more examples
No wonder, then, that so many take their laptops to the beach or that 'sleep camels', as they call them in Silicon Valley, those who sleep only at weekends, are becoming more common.
2001, Charles B. Handy, The Elephant and the Flea: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist, Harvard Business School Press, published 2002, →ISBN, page 100Sheila told her that John said musicians were like sleep camels when it came to that. They could stay awake for days when they had to.
2014, Rocky F. Catman, Meet Me at the Riverside, Lulu, →ISBN, page 198
Origin
Perhaps an analogy of a person's storing sleep to a camel's storing water.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
sleep camel. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sleep%20camel
“sleep camel.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sleep%20camel. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “sleep camel,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sleep%20camel.
Source: sleep camel on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.