Word.ws English Dictionary

dead letters

dead letters is the plural of dead letter.

Meaning of dead letter

Noun

dead letter (plural dead letters)

  1. An item of mail that cannot be delivered to its intended recipient; after some time it is returned to the sender, or destroyed.
  2. A law or other measure that is no longer enforced.
    • Laws are a dead letter, without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.1787, Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers, Federalist no. 22
  3. (broadly) Anything that has lost its authority or influence despite still being in existence or formally in force.
    • I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.1833, Edgar Allan Poe, MS. Found in a Bottle

Questions about dead letters

What is dead letters the plural of?
Dead letters is the plural of dead letter.

Words near dead letters in the dictionary

  1. dead legs
  2. dead letter
  3. dead letter box
  4. dead letter office
  5. dead letter offices
  6. dead letters
  7. dead level
  8. dead levels
  9. dead line
  10. dead link
  11. dead links

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead letters (page history and authors); dead letter (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 letters.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_letters. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.