death

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The act of dying; termination of life.
• noun The state of being dead.
• noun The cause of dying.
• noun A manner of dying.
• noun A personification of the destroyer of life, usually represented as a skeleton holding a scythe.
• noun Bloodshed; murder.
• noun Execution.
• noun Law Civil death.
• noun The termination or extinction of something.
• idiom (at death's door) Near to death; gravely ill or injured.
• idiom (be the death of) To distress or irritate to an intolerable degree.
• idiom (death on) Opposed to or strict about.
• idiom (put to death) To execute.
• idiom (to death) To an intolerable degree; extremely.
• idiom (to the death) Until one participant in a fight or struggle has died or been killed.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Cessation of life; that state of a being, animal or vegetable, in which there is a total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions, In the abstract.
• noun Actual.
• noun Figurative or poetical.
• noun [In poetry and poetical prose death is often personified.
• noun A general mortality; a deadly plague; a fatal epidemic: as, the black death (which see, below).
• noun The cessation of life in a particular part of an organic body, as a bone.
• noun A skeleton, or the figure of a skeleton, as the symbol of mortality: as, a death's head.
• noun A cause, agent, or instrument of death.
• noun Imminent deadly peril.
• noun A capital offense; an offense punishable with death.
• noun The state or place of the dead.
• noun The mode or manner of dying.
• noun Something as dreadful as death.
• noun In Scripture: The reverse of spiritual life; the mere physical and sensuous life, without any activity of the spiritual or religious nature.
• noun After physical death, the final doom of those who have lived and died in separation from God and the divine life.
• noun A slaughtering or killing.
• noun To be passionately fond of; have a great liking or capacity for: as, he was death on the sherry.
• noun Mortally; to death.
• noun Synonyms Death, Decease, Demise. See decease.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The cessation of all vital phenomena without capability of resuscitation, either in animals or plants.
• noun Total privation or loss; extinction; cessation.
• noun Manner of dying; act or state of passing from life.
• noun Cause of loss of life.
• noun Personified: The destroyer of life, -- conventionally represented as a skeleton with a scythe.
• noun Danger of death.
• noun Murder; murderous character.
• noun (Theol.) Loss of spiritual life.
• noun Anything so dreadful as to be like death.
• noun See Black death, in the Vocabulary.
• noun 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.
• noun (Zoöl.) A venomous Australian snake of the family Elapidæ, of several species, as the Hoplocephalus superbus and Acanthopis antarctica.
• noun a bell that announces a death.
• noun a light like that of a candle, viewed by the superstitious as presaging death.
• noun a cold sweat at the coming on of death.