The word "dead" has been in English since the time of "Beowulf," which has given it plenty of time to find a home in English idioms about death and more.
An Incomplete List of ‘Dead’ Idioms
- Dead ahead
- Dead broke
- Dead calm
- Dead drunk
- Dead heat
- Dead letter
- Dead meat
- Dead ringer
- Dead silence
- Dead wrong
- Dead as a dodo
- Dead as a doornail
- Dead as a herring
- Dead cat bounce
- Dead in the water
- Dead of night
- Dead of winter
- Dead on your feet
- Dead to rights
- Dead to the world
- Better dead than red
- Flog a dead horse
- The quick and the dead
- Get the dead needle (British)
- Makes a dead set at (British)
Samantha Enslen runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com or on Twitter as @DragonflyEdit.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Sources
Ammer, Christine. Dead as a doornail, dead in the water, dead ringer. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Barrere, Albert, and Charles Leland. Dead. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant. London, George Bell & Sons, 1897.
Dent, Susie. As (dead as a doornail), dead in the water, ringer. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 19th ed. Chambers Harrap, 2012.
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Oxford University Press. Dead as a doornail, dead in the water, dead ringer (subscription required, accessed October 17, 2017).
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