Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who or that which makes widows by bereaving women of their husbands.
  • noun Specifically: In lumbering, a broken limb hanging loose in the top of a tree, which in its fall may injure a man below
  • noun A breaking cable.

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

  • noun rare One who makes widows by destroying husbands.

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

  • noun idiomatic Something which or someone who takes the lives of men; a hazard that affects mostly men or is specific for some trade, occupied mostly by men.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • “Just so you know,” she said all casual, “a huge widow-maker just fell in the middle of fairway one.”

    Freefall Mindi Scott 2010

  • Critics were calling the Osprey a boondoggle and a death trap, a “widow-maker.”

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • Critics were calling the Osprey a boondoggle and a death trap, a “widow-maker.”

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • Given that record, and with its last crash nearly a decade behind it, the idea that the Osprey was a “death trap” and “widow-maker,” as its harshest critics had charged, sounded like a hysterical echo from the past.

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • Given that record, and with its last crash nearly a decade behind it, the idea that the Osprey was a “death trap” and “widow-maker,” as its harshest critics had charged, sounded like a hysterical echo from the past.

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • But the early 90s were also a time when most American teens were able to handle Macbethand the one-mile-run and getting drilled in the face by third-year senior Frankie Del Maccio's 80-mile-per-hour "widow-maker" during dodgeball in P.E. class by their sophomore year, without so much as one personal pain and suffering lawsuit levied against the school district, the gym teacher, or the kickball manufacturers.

    Brock Cohen: Welcome to Bubble Boy Nation 2010

  • Given that record, and with its last crash nearly a decade behind it, the idea that the Osprey was a “death trap” and “widow-maker,” as its harshest critics had charged, sounded like a hysterical echo from the past.

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • Critics were calling the Osprey a boondoggle and a death trap, a “widow-maker.”

    The Dream Machine Richard Whittle 2010

  • Here are few of the things we didn't include, yet have certainly been clobbered by the gadget widow-maker that is the mobile phone.

    Wired Top Stories 2008

  • Michael N_______ is my Romanian-inflected cardiologist, the one who told me about the widow-maker a couple of years ago when I refused to get an angiogram after I'd had a few episodes of atrial fibrillation.

    Cotty Chubb: The Widowmaker 2008

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