Learn 10 words for talking about sleep
Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
| Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Top Words. My name is Alisha and today, we're going to talk about 10 Words for Talking About Sleep. Let's go. |
| "To wake up." The first word is "to wake up." To wake up is to open your eyes, probably, in your bed or the place where you are sleeping. To wake up is to become conscious, to become awake. Every day you wake up, presumably, hopefully. In a sentence, "I woke up three times last night." |
| "To get up / to get out of bed." All right. The next word is "to get up," or "to get out of bed." That means to physically move your body from your bed out of bed, to stand up from your bed, to get out of your bed. We say, "to get up," or, "to get out of bed." In a sentence, "I got up at eight o'clock this morning." |
| "To snooze." The next word is "to snooze." We have to snooze and alarm, and also, to snooze. To snooze means to take a short sleep, to have a short sleeping time. Or, to snooze an alarm is when your alarm goes off in the morning, you have a button, most alarm clocks have some button you can press so the alarm will turn on again in, like, five or 10 minutes, or something. To snooze an alarm is to ask your alarm to wake you up again a few minutes later. That's to snooze. We have to snooze an alarm and to snooze, meaning a short light sleep. In a sentence, "I always snooze my alarm at least once." That is usually true. |
| "To oversleep." The next word is "to oversleep." To oversleep means to sleep too much or to sleep late. Actually, no. It doesn't mean to sleep late. To sleep late means just to sleep until a late time in the day. Oversleep means sleeping beyond the time you wanted to get up. For example, if my alarm is set for eight o'clock but I wake up at nine o'clock, I overslept. I slept beyond my wake-up time. We can use "oversleep" to talk about times when you sleep too much, you sleep more than your body needs you to. Maybe your body needs, depending on the person, six to nine hours or so. But, if you sleep 14 hours, we can say that's oversleeping, you're sleeping too much. That's the nuance here. In a sentence, "I overslept on my first day of work." |
| "Nap." The next word is "nap." Nap is a short sleep. A nap is, maybe, 30 minutes, one hour, just a short sleep or short rest. A lot of people will take a nap in the afternoon, for example--or, maybe, children, actually, take naps, for example, in preschool or when they're very, very young, they have an afternoon nap, a short sleep. Yeah, just an hour or so, I imagine. In a sentence, "I love naps." Actually, I do like naps. I don't like naps because when I take a nap, it becomes a sleep. It's always I wake up four hours later and I'm like, "Okay, well, I've destroyed my sleep schedule." |
| "Dream." The next word is "dream." Dreams are those visions, those images you see, those, maybe experiences it seems like you have when you are asleep. In a sentence, "I always have weird dreams." |
| "Nightmare." The next word is "nightmare." "Nightmare" is a word which means bad dream or scary dream, negative dream. Children, maybe, have nightmares a lot. They wake up crying or they're really upset by nightmares, monsters, terrifying things happening, and so on. In a sentence, "Do you ever have nightmares?" |
| "To go to bed." The next word is "to go to bed." Before we talked about "to get up" or "to get out of bed," this is the opposite. To go to bed means to get in your bed, to try to go to sleep, to go to bed. In a sentence, "I usually go to bed fairly late." |
| "To hit the hay/to hit the sack." The next expression is, I don't know, a slang expression. We have "to hit the hay" and "to hit the sack." These both mean to go to bed. They both mean to try to fall asleep, but we just use them in more casual situations. The image here of hit the hay is with your body hitting hay, like laying down in hay. I believe, historically, because hay was used to stuff things that people slept on, that's why we have this expression, "to hit the hay with your body." Same thing for "to hit the sack." A sack full of something soft to sleep on is where this expression comes from. In a sentence, "I think I'm going to hit the hay." |
| "To fall asleep." The next expression is "to fall asleep." To fall asleep, you're in bed, and finally, you lose consciousness, you stop being aware, you are asleep. In that moment, we say, you fall asleep. In a sentence, "It takes me a long time to fall asleep." |
| All right. Okay. That's the end. Those are 10 words that you can use to talk about sleep. If you have an interesting dream or an interesting nightmare, make sure and leave it in a comment. That sounds like it would be a really funny, a really interesting thing to read about. If you have something memorable, leave it in a comment, so we can all check it out and compare our dreams. That's funny. Thanks very much for watching this episode of Top Words and we'll see you again soon. Bye! |
Comments
Hide