Word.ws English Dictionary

dead first

dead first adjective: first, especially first place in a competition.

Adjective

dead first (not comparable)

  1. (nonstandard, possibly, rare) First, especially first place in a competition.
    • But when the Great Kroger Bagoff ended the other day at the Alexandria Drive store it was 22-year-old Daniel Vichitbandha who finished dead first.1987, "Snake tale didn't have a leg to stand on," Lexington Herald Leader (Kentucky, USA), 15 Oct. (retrieved 20 Oct 2010)
    • When I was going through basic training in the army, we had some physical tests, running, pushups, and such like stuff, and I finished dead last by a sizable margin. We also had an intelligence test, and I finished dead first, again by a sizable margin.1990, Isaac Asimov, “Editorial: Sharing Universes”, in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, volume 140, page 5
    Synonyms:
    dead last

Examples of dead first in a sentence

  • Pittsburgh had finished second in the software firm's 1993 study, when Philadelphia also finished dead first.1998 November 5, Len Boselovic, "Pittsburgh's Tax Bite 4th Highest of 27 Big U.S. Cities", in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, page E-7
  • Once [sic] race I came in dead first and the other dead last.2007, Kathy Sherwin, Road Race - The Hell of the North, blogspot.com, 7 April (retrieved 20 Oct. 2010)
  • The Rams, meanwhile, finished dead first in last year's NFL Draft.2010 October 17, Derek Estes, “Upset Alert: Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Rams Bucking the Odds at Halftime”, in Bleacher Report, retrieved...

Synonyms of dead first

Questions about dead first

What does dead first mean?
Dead first means first, especially first place in a competition.
How do you use dead first in a sentence?
Pittsburgh had finished second in the software firm's 1993 study, when Philadelphia also finished dead first.
What part of speech is dead first?
Dead first is an adjective.

Words near dead first in the dictionary

  1. dead duck
  2. dead ducks
  3. dead end
  4. dead ends
  5. dead finish
  6. dead first
  7. dead fish
  8. dead fishes
  9. dead flat
  10. dead flats
  11. dead flesh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead first (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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