1 [U,C] the time of day when light first appears
SYNDAYBREAK, SUNRISE:
They start work at dawn. * It's almost dawn. * We arrived in Sydney as dawn broke (= as the first light could be seen). * I woke up just before dawn. * summer's early dawns * He works from dawn till dusk (= from morning till night). * The plane took off, leaving London behind in a blue-grey dawn.
compareDUSK
2 [sing.] ~ (of sth) the beginning or first signs of sth:
the dawn of civilization / time / history * Peace marked a new dawn in the country's history. * the dawn of a golden age in European art
IDIOMS see BREAKn., CRACKn.
verb [V]
1 (written) (of a day or a period of time) to begin:
The following morning dawned bright and warm. * A new technological age had dawned.
2 to become obvious or easy to understand:
Slowly the awful truth dawned.
IDIOMS see LIGHTn.
PHRASALVERBS
dawn on sb [nopassive] if sth dawns on you, you begin to realize it for the first time:
[+that] Suddenly it dawned on me that they couldn't possibly have met before.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for dawn is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is dawn a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, dawn is tagged as noun.
Does dawn appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — dawn appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.