Origin Story
Seeing nightmare, you might guess it means "a mare of the night" — but this mare has nothing to do with horses. In Old English and Germanic myth, a mare was a demon that climbed onto the chest of a sleeping person, stopped their breath, and forced them into terrifying dreams. What we now call sleep paralysis, people once believed to be the work of this spirit. So the word nightmare arose, meaning "the demon (mare) that comes by night." At first it named the demon itself; later it came to mean the frightening dream the demon was thought to bring.
The animal mare ("female horse") comes from an entirely different Old English word, mearh ("horse"). The two only sound alike; their roots differ. The -mar in the French word cauchemar ("nightmare") also comes from the same Germanic demon, mare.
-
Online Etymology Dictionarynightmare (n.): c. 1300, "an evil female spirit afflicting men in their sleep with a feeling of suffocation," from night + mare (n.3) "goblin that causes nightmares, incubus," from Old English mære
-
Merriam-Webster Dictionarynightmare: from night + mare (an evil spirit thought to oppress people during sleep), from Old English mara
-
Oxford English Dictionarynightmare: from night + Old English mare "incubus," an evil spirit believed to lie on and suffocate sleepers
Word Evolution
Words from the Same Root
Memory Hook
Remember that the mare in nightmare is not a horse but "a night demon that presses on the chest." Sleep paralysis is its root.
""People once took sleep paralysis for the touch of a demon arriving in the night.""
