A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
dayspring
Dayspring is the first appearance of light in the morning, the moment daybreak begins rather than the whole of it. It is archaic in ordinary speech and survives mostly through the King James Bible and through poetry that followed it.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound of day and spring, using spring in its older and more physical sense of something rising or breaking out, the same sense that gives a spring of water and the season. English has a habit of building words this way and then losing the pieces: daybreak survives, dayspring has faded, and uprist, another old word for sunrise, is gone entirely.
Notes
It appears in Job, where God asks whether the listener has ever commanded the morning and caused the dayspring to know his place, and in Luke, in the passage about the dayspring from on high. Both uses treat first light as something that arrives rather than something that happens, which is the sense the word carries that dawn has largely lost.