sleep like a log/top

To experience a very deep and restful sleep; to sleep soundly. I can't believe you finished a triathlon! You're going to sleep like a log tonight. I have to set numerous alarms for the morning because I sleep like a log every night!

To experience a very deep and restful sleep; to sleep soundly. I can't believe you finished a triathlon! You're going to sleep like a top tonight. I have to set numerous alarms for the morning because I sleep like a top every night!

to sleep very soundly. Everyone in our family sleeps like a log, so no one heard the thunderstorm in the middle of the night. Nothing can wake me up. I usually sleep like a baby.

Also, sleep like a top. Sleep very soundly, as in I slept like a log, or She said she slept like a top. Both of these similes transfer the immobility of an object to that of a person who is sound asleep (since a top spinning quickly looks immobile). The first dates from the late 1600s; the variant is newer.

COMMON If you sleep like a log, you have a very deep sleep. I slept like a log last night and feel full of energy.

To sleep very soundly. The earliest simile of this kind, now obsolete, is to sleep like a swine (pig/hog), which dates from Chaucer’s time. “I shall sleep like a top,” wrote Sir William Davenant in Rivals (1668), no doubt referring to a spinning top that, when spinning fast, is so steady and quiet that it seems not to move at all. This simile persists, particularly in Britain. To sleep like a log is more often heard in America, although it has English forebears back as far as the sixteenth century. An older cliché is to sleep the sleep of the just, meaning to sleep soundly, presumably because one has a clear conscience. Its original source is a 1695 translation of a passage from the French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine’s Summary of the History of Port-Royal.