unsleeping

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ sleeping.

Adjective

unsleeping (comparative more unsleeping, superlative most unsleeping)

1. Not sleeping.
   • 1913 October, Jack London, chapter XV, in The Valley of the Moon, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, book II, page 246:

     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.

2. (figuratively) Remaining constantly alert.
   • 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:

     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.

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

     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.

   • 1930, Building for the Future:

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

3. Remaining constantly active.
   • 1996, Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands, page 9:

     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.

   • 2011, Tim Bowler, River Boy:

     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.

Verb

unsleeping

1. past participle of unsleep