Word.ws English Dictionary

dead-pays

dead-pays is the plural of dead-pay.

Meaning of dead-pay

Noun

dead-pay (countable and uncountable, plural dead-pays)

  1. Pay drawn for soldiers, or others, really dead, whose names are kept on the payroll.
    • O you commanders, / That, like me, have no dead-pays.c. 1621-1626, Philip Massinger, The Unnatural Combat
  2. A dead soldier whose pay is illicitly claimed by another person.

Questions about dead-pays

What is dead-pays the plural of?
Dead-pays is the plural of dead-pay.

Words near dead-pays in the dictionary

  1. dead-pan
  2. dead-panned
  3. dead-panning
  4. dead-pans
  5. dead-pay
  6. dead-pays
  7. dead-red
  8. dead-reds
  9. dead-ringer
  10. dead-ringers
  11. dead-rope

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead-pays (page history and authors); dead-pay (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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