- When a person is "sleep," they are unaware of what is happening in their surroundings. This term comes from the adjective asleep meaning ‘in a state of sleep’ because if someone is "sleep," they are oblivious to what is happening around them as if they were actually "asleep." While this new meaning of sleep is a metaphorical extension of physically sleeping to mentally sleeping, this new use of sleep as an adjective is probably not zero derivation. Instead, it is likely just the clipping of the adjective "asleep," which we can tell is the case based on how sleep is used like asleep grammatically in sentences.
sleep (2)
adjective; clipping
unaware or oblivious of something
Source : “Everyone is sleep on Kourtney Kardashian. They're just now realizing that she is actually the best Kardashian.” –friend (Sept 20, 2015)
Last modified: 13 December 2015