Dictionary

night fear en · NOUN

Etymology

From night + fear.

Meanings

1. (uncountable) The fear of the night, nighttime, or darkness.
   • As the twenty-first century dawns, humanity is beginning to recover from its night-fear. 2013, Greogory L. Matloff, Deep-Space Probes, page 25:
   • At night, the sounds were different, no less pitiful. Screams from nightmare and nightfear. 2004, Gail Sidonie Sobat, A Winter's Tale, page 101:
   • […] just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood — what luck! — never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, cold lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numbly before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; […] 1983, Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions:
   • All this time, O thanks to worldcasts on the gloopy TV and, more, lewdies' night-fear through lack of night-police, dead lay the street. 1962, Anthony Burgess, edited by Andrew Biswell, A Clockwork Orange, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, published 2012, →ISBN, page 66:
2. (countable, figuratively, qualifier:literal) A fear or terror that one typically has at night.
   • A new form of fear within me—the real night-fear of the unknown, my honest doubt as to whether we would survive. 2014, Barry Blanchard, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains:
   • It has required much British resolution to overcome the night-fear of going out into the unhallowed ground of matter-of-fact, where the farthest earlier excursions of the governmental agencies had taken them no farther than such financial transactions as are incident to the accomplishment of anything whatever in a commercial nation. 1917, Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, page 251:

Forms

Synonyms

nightfright (fear of the night) · noctophobia (fear of the night) · nyctophobia (fear of the night)