Other forms: sleeping, slept, sleeps
To sleep is to close your eyes and rest unconscious until you wake. Sleep well, go to sleep, she is sleeping.
The past tense is slept. As a noun it is uncountable: get some sleep, a good night's sleep, lose sleep over something. Sleep in means to wake later than usual, and sleep on it means to postpone a decision until morning. Note sleep like a log; put to sleep, which of an animal means euthanasia; and that sleep deprivation is a recognised medical and legal category.
1verbsleepTo rest unconscious with your eyes closed.~7%
“He slept for about fourteen hours and woke up hungry.”
2nounstateThe state or period of sleeping.~93%
“I didn't get much sleep last night because the baby kept crying.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sleep is a state of rest.
Old English slaepan is Germanic and related to the word behind slack — the root idea is going limp. Sleep is named for what the body does rather than for what the mind stops doing.
Proto-Germanic
*slēpaną — to sleep
Proto-West Germanic
*slāpan
ang-ang
slēpan
Middle English
slepen
English, today
sleep
From Middle English slepen, from ang-ang slēpan (ang-wsx slǣpan), from Proto-West Germanic slāpan, from Proto-Germanic slēpaną (“to sleep”). 2 Cognate with frr sleepe, sliap, sliip, släipe (“to sleep”), stq släipe (“to sleep”), West Frisian sliepe (“to sleep”), gsw schlaaffe, schlaafä, schlafe, schloafe, schloafen, schlofe, schlàfu (“to sleep”), bar schlofn, schlåfn, sghlofn (“to sleep”), gmw-cfr schlofe (“to sleep”), cim slaafan, slafan, slavan (“to sleep”), Dutch and Low German slapen (“to sleep”), German schlafen (“to sleep”), li schloëpe, slaope (“to sleep”), lb schlofen (“to sleep”), mhn schloven (“to sleep”), wym šłȫfa, śłöfa (“to sleep”), Yiddish שלאָפֿן (“to sleep”), gme-cgo schlipen (“to sleep”), Gothic 𐍃𐌻𐌴𐍀𐌰𐌽 (“to sleep”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA