A useful word: uhtceare

[sonia]

from prettygoodword October 16, 2023

uhtceare (OOT-key-are-a) - n., lying awake with anxiety before dawn.

This isn't really a fair word to run, as it isn't English -- it's Old English. So not only not the right language, but rare to boot, being a hapax legomenon, or word used only once in a surviving corpus (which could be either a single text, an author's works, or entire language, depending on context -- here it's the language). But it shows up in lists of old, forgotten words that are fun to know. The word is a compound of ūhta, the time of night before dawn +‎ caru, care/worry/anxiety, and the single known instance is from "The Wife's Lament": hæfde iċ ūhtċeare hwǣr mīn lēodfruma landes wǣre (I had pre-dawn anxiety, wondering where in the world my prince might be).

I find the whole post endearing, and I ran across it right after reading someone's post about lying awake before dawn, and I had been doing some of that myself.

Comments

[silveradept]

Ah, that's a very useful word for when that happens to me.

[sonia]

Sorry to hear that/glad it’s useful!