Dreamy

How to spell dreamy

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dreamy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dreamy mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a soft, vague, or pleasantly distracted quality, as if lost in thought or fantasy.

Dreamy in a sentence

• She had a dreamy expression as she stared out of the train window.

• The spa played soft, dreamy music to help clients relax.

Where does dreamy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word dream comes from Old English, where the form was dr"eam, though that older word actually meant 'joy', 'mirth' or 'music', and the modern sense of a vision during sleep may owe something to the closely related Old Norse and Germanic words for such night visions. By the Middle English period the word had settled into its familiar meaning of images experienced while asleep. The adjective dreamy was formed much later, around the early 1800s, by adding the common English suffix -y, which turns a noun into an adjective meaning 'full of' or 'characterised by'. Its spelling is straightforward because the silent letter pattern of dream is simply kept and the final consonant is not doubled before -y, since dream ends in a long vowel sound followed by m. The same root survives in the everyday words daydream and dreamer.

How the word is built

• dream (sleep vision, fanciful state)
• -y (adjective suffix: having the quality of)