Word.ws English Dictionary

death-names

death-names is the plural of death-name.

Meaning of death-name

Noun

death-name (plural death-names)

  1. A name that is given (usually by a priest) to refer to someone who has died so that the living can avoid using the actual name of the dead person.
    • Indeed, those old insurgents, of 1868, are gradually being canonized with crimson death-names, because they neither knew dishonor, no, nor suffered it.1906, John Luther Long, The Way of the Gods, page 25

Questions about death-names

What is death-names the plural of?
Death-names is the plural of death-name.

Words near death-names in the dictionary

  1. death-knells
  2. death-like
  3. death-messenger
  4. death-messengers
  5. death-name
  6. death-names
  7. death-of-man
  8. death-pit
  9. death-price
  10. death-prices
  11. death-rattle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: death-names (page history and authors); death-name (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: “death-names.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/death-names. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.