somnambulist

Borrowed from French somnambuliste, from Medieval Latin somnambulus (“sleepwalker”), from Latin somnus (“sleep”) + ambulō (“to walk”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): [sɒmˈnæmbjʊlɪst]

somnambulist (plural somnambulists)

1. A person who walks about in his or her sleep; a sleepwalker.
   • 1824, Sir Walter Scott, chapter 17, in St. Ronan's Well:

     The clergyman floundered a moment, as is usual with an absent man who is recovering the train of his ideas, or a somnambulist when he is suddenly awakened.

   • 1977, William Weaver (translator), Italo Calvino (author), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (first published 1969), part 2, chapter 5, 1969

     He must have promptly rejected an alternative explanation which would better fulfill the demands of verisimilitude (“My wife, poor thing, in her nervous condition, now is afflicted also with sleepwalking!”), seeing the laborious tasks to which the resumed somnambulist devotes herself: kneeling at the edge of a pit, she anoints the earth with murky philters (unless the implements she holds in her hand are to be interpreted actually as acetylene torches scattering sparks, to melt the lead seals of a coffin).

• somnambulate
• somnambulistic

• immunoblasts

• IPA^(key): [som.nam.buˈlist]

somnambulist m (plural somnambuliști)

1. somnambulist

• noctambul
• somnambul