Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The quality of being deathly; resemblance to death in its aspects or phenomena.

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

  • noun The quality of being deathly; deadliness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or quality of being deathly.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • If not as great a colorist as Delacroix, Géricault made an appropriate palette of deathliness.

    Revolutionary Romanticism 2009

  • The Earth, with its life-giving vitality, as well as its deathliness, was a convergence of Eros and Thanatos.

    The Fruit Hunters Adam Leith Gollner 2008

  • The Earth, with its life-giving vitality, as well as its deathliness, was a convergence of Eros and Thanatos.

    The Fruit Hunters Adam Leith Gollner 2008

  • The Earth, with its life-giving vitality, as well as its deathliness, was a convergence of Eros and Thanatos.

    The Fruit Hunters Adam Leith Gollner 2008

  • Not a blade of grass, not a flower, not even the hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the utter deathliness of the scene.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 Various

  • And surely when, as she turned from side to side, I caught her full face – what a face it was! withered, thin, sallow almost to deathliness, with a bright rouge-spot on each cheek, a broad smile on the ghastly mouth.

    John Halifax, Gentleman 1897

  • Others were growing cold, and the life upon them was artificial and strange, only achieved by a highly intellectual and noble race, with an extraordinary command of natural forces, fighting in wonderfully constructed and guarded dwellings against the growing deathliness of a frozen world, and with a tortured despair in their minds at the extinction which threatened them.

    The Child of the Dawn Arthur Christopher Benson 1893

  • And surely when, as she turned from side to side, I caught her full face -- what a face it was! withered, thin, sallow almost to deathliness, with a bright rouge-spot on each cheek, a broad smile on the ghastly mouth.

    John Halifax, Gentleman Dinah Maria Mulock Craik 1856

  • As we discover this, we understand that everything we've been reading has been recalled with one more layer of deathliness cast over it than we thought.

    Books news, reviews and author interviews | guardian.co.uk 2010

  • The emptiness of the white covering, the deathliness of the stripped trees, the frozen ground, suggest a world betrayed and nature itself turning on the innocents.

    The Guardian World News 2010

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