Nightmare

How to spell nightmare

9 letters · 2 syllables

5 of the 102 people asked to spell nightmare in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce nightmare

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nightmare mean?

1. nounA distressing or terrifying dream.
2. nounA very frightening, stressful, or thoroughly unpleasant situation or experience.

Nightmare in a sentence

• She woke at three with her heart pounding after a vivid nightmare.

• The airport delays turned our journey home into a complete nightmare.

• The child climbed into bed with his parents because of a nightmare.

• Filing the tax return without the right paperwork was an absolute nightmare.

Where does nightmare come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word combines the everyday 'night' with a much darker and now forgotten element, 'mare'. In Old English a mære was a malevolent spirit or goblin that folklore said crouched on the chest of a sleeping person and pressed the breath out of them, producing a feeling of suffocation. The compound 'nightmare' appears in Middle English around the 1300s with exactly that sense: the demon itself, not the dream. Only later, by the 1500s and especially the 1700s, did the meaning soften into the frightening dream we now mean, and then into any thoroughly unpleasant experience. The 'mare' here is not the female horse, which comes from a separate Old English word mearh; the spelling overlap is pure coincidence, which is why the link to nocturnal terror is no longer obvious.

How the word is built

• night (Old English niht: night)
• mare (Old English mære: an evil spirit thought to suffocate sleepers)