adjective
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heavy with sleepiness; sleepy
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inducing sleep; soporific
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sluggish or lethargic; dull
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of drowsy
Explanation
Drowsy means sleepy and having low energy. When you’re sitting in the warm sunlight after a big lunch, and you’re so drowsy you can’t keep your eyes open, it’s not the right time to try organizing your desk. Ah drowsy, a word that describes slow-moving lions and charming little towns equally well. It has a pleasant association to it, a nice cozy sleepiness, like the sort of feeling you have when you can’t exactly figure out why your eyes keep closing, they just do. Wine makes some people drowsy and a boring documentary will definitely do it to you. Drowsy comes from an Old English word meaning "falling," and has evolved into falling asleep.
Vocabulary lists containing drowsy
"Macbeth" Vocabulary from Act III
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"The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes
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Milkweed
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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.
See Examples For:
Studies of healthcare workers suggest that even a 20-to-50-minute nap during or after a shift improves focus and reduces drowsy driving on the way home.
From BBC ● Jul. 19, 2026
Upon arriving home, the complaint states, C.K. was extremely drowsy, lethargic and irritable.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 8, 2026
A team that had never won so much as nine straight games during the drowsy regular season suddenly rattled off 13 straight victories in the playoffs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2026
For example, Samsara’s cameras used in delivery trucks can help determine when a driver is distracted or drowsy, and deliver real-time alerts.
From Barron's ● Jun. 11, 2026
The very small living room incredibly contained—aside from things to sit on—an organ, a piano, a garden of flowering flowerpots, and usually a darting little dog and a large, drowsy cat.
From "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
But because Iridium was only a near-failure and not a total one, it’s also a peculiar — and drowsier — turnaround story.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 17, 2016
The volunteers still felt drowsier in the afternoon.
From BBC ● Oct. 29, 2014
After that, the show became a kind of dinner-theater version of itself -- flaccid, repetitious, drowsier than the Texas economy -- and receded discreetly into the haze of Has-Been.
From Time Magazine Archive
And while I looked, I grew drowsier and drowsier; my eyes would close, then half open, and there would be the hantu sails and the fire for company, growing more and more indistinct.
From The Spinner's Book of Fiction by Various
The moving flare that ringed The escutcheoned hearse, lit every leaf distinct Along the hedges and woke the sleeping birds, But drew no watchers from the drowsier farms.
From Collected Poems Volume Two by Alfred Noyes
“Ma Belle, My Beauty” comes pre-drenched in the languid pleasures of late summer; for anyone looking for a respite from and a celebration of the season’s drowsiest dog days, it works a trick.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 24, 2021
Up India's Hooghly River one day last February sailed a weird vessel which made even the drowsiest citizens rub their eyes.
From Time Magazine Archive
Ez to my gitten in five minits," he began in his laziest, drowsiest manner, "we'll see when the time's up.
From Cressy by Bret Harte
It stands mid-way up a well-wooded hill, about two and a half miles from a dreamy, drowsy old village, in one of the dreamiest, drowsiest nooks of bonnie, tree-clad Berkshire.
From O'er Many Lands, on Many Seas by Gordon Stables
It was the drowsiest of murmurs, but few things have been so welcome to me in all my life.
From The Firefly of France by Marion Polk Angellotti
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.
