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

[jesse_the_k]

And it's gratifying that folks more than a thousand years ago were also contemplating the void near sunrise.

I've been enjoying the WordHord app

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/old-english-wordhord/id1535982564

which offers an old English word-a-day, with IPA transcription plus recorded pronunciation.

It was recommended by a pal who follows the blog

https://oldenglishwordhord.com/about/

(which I haven't gotten the energy to read yet, but now I'm reminded :,))

[sonia]

Yeah, now that you mention it, I bet people have been lying awake for much longer than that!

Thanks for the app suggestion, too. Please post good words if you run across them!