Chapter Deanery to Debase of D by Webster's Dictionary (1913 Edition)

functions of the brain, the circulatory and the respiratory organs; by the latter the entire disappearance of the vital actions of the ultimate structural constituents of the body. When death takes place, the body as a whole dies first, the death of the tissues sometimes not occurring until after a considerable interval. Huxley.

2. Total privation or loss; extinction; cessation; as, the death of memory.

The death of a language can not be exactly compared with the death of a plant.

J. Peile.

3. Manner of dying; act or state of passing from life.

A death that I abhor.

Shak.

Let me die the death of the righteous.

Num. xxiii. 10.

4. Cause of loss of life.

Swiftly flies the feathered death.

Dryden.

He caught his death the last county sessions.

Addison.

5. Personified: The destroyer of life, — conventionally represented as a skeleton with a scythe.

Death! great proprietor of all.

Young.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.

Rev. vi. 8.

6. Danger of death. "In deaths oft." 2 Cor. xi. 23.

7. Murder; murderous character.

Not to suffer a man of death to live.

Bacon.

8. (Theol.) Loss of spiritual life.

To be carnally minded is death.

Rom. viii. 6.

9. Anything so dreadful as to be like death.

It was death to them to think of entertaining such doctrines.

Atterbury.

And urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death.

Judg. xvi. 16.

Death is much used adjectively and as the first part of a compound, meaning, in general, of or pertaining to death, causing or presaging death; as, deathbed or death bed; deathblow or death blow, etc.

Black death. See Black death, in the Vocabulary. — Civil death, the separation of a man from civil society, or the debarring him from the enjoyment of civil rights, as by banishment, attainder, abjuration of the realm, entering a monastery, etc. Blackstone. — Death adder. (Zoöl.) (a) A kind of viper found in South Africa (Acanthophis tortor); — so called from the virulence of its venom. (b) A venomous Australian snake of the family Elapidæ, of several species, as the Hoplocephalus superbus and Acanthopis antarctica. — Death bell, a bell that announces a death.

The death bell thrice was heard to ring.

Mickle.