Sleeping Beauty
2
3.7
- noun
- /ˈsliːpɪŋ ˈbjuːti/
- Literature
:
La Bella Durmiente
- In the story, Sleeping Beauty waits for true love's kiss to wake her from a curse.
- Wake up, sleeping beauty
Examples
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Hey, sleeping beauty.
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Alexej Alexejewitsch, our Sleeping Beauty, needed someone to translate for him, and they asked me.
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All right, this Sleeping Beauty needs to get her rest.
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The life you were gonna have with sleeping beauty over there?
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Like you're Sleeping Beauty and along comes this Prince Charming.
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"We the people" have the power, but like Sleeping Beauty, we've fallen asleep.
Blog text (8) -
Wake up, sleeping beauty.
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Thus did the embrace of a poor but devoted Prince Charming awaken his sleeping beauty.
Academic text (2014) -
After a long day at the party, he finally fell asleep like a true Sleeping Beauty.
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The children called their friend Sleeping Beauty because she always slept in during weekends.
How Attractive
- Literature
2
3.7
- NSFW
198
3.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
A learner who knows 'sleeping' and 'beauty' can readily infer the literal sense 'a beautiful person who is asleep', so the phrase is partially compositional. However, the conventionalized fairy-tale referent (the princess cursed into a prolonged sleep and awakened by a prince) and its extended figurative uses are cultural/lexical knowledge not predictable from the parts alone, so full interpretation requires prior exposure.
Etymology
Sleeping Beauty comes from the fairy tale image of a sleeping princess who stays a beauty while she waits to be woken by a prince. Because of that picture, people call someone who sleeps very deeply or a quiet place waiting to be fixed a 'Sleeping Beauty'.