Five Arabic Words Meaning “Nightmare”

فَوْضى

root: ف-و-ض / noun / definition: chaos

I’ve just emailed a wonderfully chaotic draft of a PhD chapter to my supervisor who, if he’s reading this post, might scoff at the word “wonderfully” coming anywhere near the mention of that calamitous document—the second half of which is a roaring pandemonium of red font and fragmented thoughts written in shorthand.

I’m half-scared that I’ve left something embarrassing in the mess at the end, like some lines from one of the unserious poems my friend and I compose on the train home sometimes, or my to-do list which always seems to have “laundry” at the top and more questionable things at the bottom.

Well, a draft’s a draft, isn’t it?

Oh, and رمضان مبارك!

With today’s deadline out of the way, I can finally write about something other than Arabic novels.

Well, it’s not as if we’re going to stray too far from it here—this is a blog about Arabic, after all. But at least I’ll be writing about Arabic vocabulary instead.

And what vocabulary have I chosen to write about? Arabic nouns that mean “nightmare”.

(I guess it’s my subconscious evaluation of that draft chapter. There’s always an underlying reason why I choose the topics of these posts.)

So here are five ways to say “nightmare” in Arabic—and four of them, interestingly, follow the pattern فاعول:

قابوس / كابوس

These two are word twins.

كابوس comes from the root ك-ب-س which is associated with exerting pressure and attacking. (The root is also associated with marinating food, but I think that’s less relevant to bad dreams…)

قابوس, meanwhile, from the root ق-ب-س, is related to fire and borrowing. Maybe it’s not relevant to analyse these associations as perhaps قابوس is just a pronunciation variant of كابوس.

But I like analysing. And my mind is already linking fire to the suffering someone experiences whilst having a nightmare, and borrowing to the fact your mind “borrows” thoughts and memories to construct dreams. Yeah… it’s a stretch.

جاثوم / جُثام

Okay, so these two aren’t word twins but they are from the same root.

ج-ث-م is related to crouching, or weighing heavily upon something. We actually saw another word from this root in Arabic Observations: Another Collection of Word Twins.

جُثام and جاثوم both mean “nightmare”, but I’ve also seen جاثوم being used to refer to sleep paralysis.

ضاغوط

Ending the list, we have this rather lonely-looking word.

ضاغوط is derived from the root ض-غ-ط which is all about pressure.

It seems that that’s something shared with these words for “nightmare”—the roots ك-ب-س and ج-ث-م are also related to pressure and weight. I guess having a nightmare feels like something pressing hard on your chest. Or some evil thing crouching over you.

Spooky.

Wrapping up this post, I’ve just realised the topic is kind of related to our last Wehr Wednesdays post in which we explored the phrase لا يأخذ الكرى بمعقد جفنه.

I hope that was my subconscious link to “nightmare”, and that the topic of this post is not in any way a premonition of my supervisor’s future comments on that draft.

Anyway, I wish you all sweet dreams.

!تصبحون على خير