dawn
1 Americannoun
noun
noun
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daybreak; sunrise
-
the sky when light first appears in the morning
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the beginning of something
verb
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to begin to grow light after the night
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to begin to develop, appear, or expand
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to begin to become apparent (to)
Other Word Forms
- dawnlike adjective
- undawned adjective
Etymology
Origin of dawn
First recorded before 1150; Middle English dawen (verb), Old English dagian, derivative of dæg day; akin to Old Norse daga, Middle Dutch, Middle Low German dagen, Old High German tagēn
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
He also advises recreating in areas where there are lifeguards keeping an eye out for sharks and to avoid swimming or surfing around dawn and dusk when shark feeding behavior tends to peak.
From Los Angeles Times
At the dawn of the 2025 season, we published a column with the headline, “What’s the future for aging Angel Stadium? It feels like an increasingly uncertain one.”
From Los Angeles Times
I went to my binder of go-to seasonal recipes and realized, with a kind of dawning horror, that nearly all of them leaned on it.
From Salon
That involves “rising before dawn to begin the day with liturgical prayer and returning to church periodically during the day for further prayer together.”
From MarketWatch
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan gathered before dawn Thursday in Riyadh for talks aimed at finding a diplomatic off-ramp to the war in Iran.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
