unsleeping

comparative more unsleeping · superlative most unsleeping

1. Not sleeping.

   All that night Saxon lay, unsleeping, without taking off her clothes, and when she arose in the morning and washed her face and dressed her hair she was aware of a strange numbness, of a feeling of constriction about her head as if it were bound by a heavy band of iron.

   1913 October, Jack London, chapter XV, in The Valley of the Moon, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, book II, page 246

2. figurativelyRemaining constantly alert.

   An unsleeping eye watches the steam pressure and steadily regulates the firing much more economically and patiently than the most experienced fireman.

   1930, Building for the Future

   2 more examples

   Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints—the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.

   1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Quarter-deck”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, page 177

   Captain Kennedy, who is the Commodore of the fleet, and so always commands the newest and best ship of the line, is an admirable seaman, with a quick eye for everything, always on deck at critical moments, watching with unsleeping vigilance over the safety of all on board.

   1887, Henry Martyn Field, From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn, page 9

3. Remaining constantly active.

   A shiver of cool air wafted over her and passed; and she remembered her debt, and why she had come out. She looked down at the unsleeping river.

   2011, Tim Bowler, River Boy

   1 more example

   Five hundred miles of moonlit fields and sleeping villages; of black towns and unsleeping furnaces; rain, fog, and frost; snow flurry and flood; tunnel and viaduct.

   1996, Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands, page 9

1. participlepastpast participle of unsleep