Word.ws English Dictionary

dead-light

dead-light is the alternative form of deadlight.

Meaning of deadlight

Noun

deadlight (plural deadlights)

  1. A strong (often wooden) shutter fitted over a porthole, that can be closed in bad weather to keep water out and discourage the glass windows from breaking.
  2. A deck prism, a device to allow light into the cabin of boat through the deck.
  3. (archaic, figuratively) An eye.
    • Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights!1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC
  4. (archaic, figuratively) An eyelid.
    • He had one hand on the bounce bottle—and he'd never let go of that since he got back to the table—but he had a handkerchief in the other and was swabbing his deadlights with it.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VI, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

Forms of dead-light

pluraldead-lights

Questions about dead-light

What is dead-light the alternative form of?
Dead-light is the alternative form of deadlight.

Words near dead-light in the dictionary

  1. dead-heartedness
  2. dead-in-shell
  3. dead-leg
  4. dead-legs
  5. dead-lift
  6. dead-light
  7. dead-lights
  8. dead-march
  9. dead-marches
  10. dead-melt
  11. dead-melted

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead-light (page history and authors); deadlight (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dead-light.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead-light. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.