Is there a word to describe someone who wakes up in predawn?

I'm trying to translate a poem from Persian. In the poem there is a noun that describes the person who has woken up before the dawn, way before others! It's used in a metaphorical way to describe the person as more aware and wiser than others, not just a bit but much more than them.

Is there a noun to be used for this particular kind of purpose?


The generic term for this:

early riser (Collins) n
a person who gets up early in the morning: My wife and I are early risers, usually up by 6.00.

There is no specific term for someone who rises before dawn. Terms like "night owl" refer to staying up late, not getting up early.


The closest idiom in English would be the early bird, from the saying

The early bird catches the worm.

The early bird (the one who wakes up early) is thought to be more prepared because it is able to seize an opportunity (like a worm) before anyone else. This idiom is thoroughly ingrained into English usage as both a noun (early bird - one who gets up early; an early-riser) and an adjective (like early bird sales, or shopping discounts that start when a store opens). This usage suggests preparedness, which may be the kind of wisdom you're looking for.

Other usages might be more regionally or metaphorically understood. The UK expression "up with the lark" might suggest a phrase like "lark-riser" or "early lark." This has some interesting symbolic associations in earlier literature and art: Chaucer (among other poets) associates the lark with daybreak ("the bisy larke, messager of day") and later poets and artists use it in various liminal (threshold) senses to mean, for example, a transition from worldly to Heavenly knowledge (see Ghirlandaio's Last Supper. That said, this would definitely fly under the threshold of most readers' conscious understanding, and I'd read it as metaphor in a poem: I'd try to figure out what the "lark" serves as a vehicle to.