Word.ws English Dictionary

death-price

death-price noun: a monetary value assigned to a person based on their social rank, representing the compensation to be paid by an offender to the victim’s family in the event of unlawful killing.

Noun

death-price (plural death-prices)

  1. (Germanic, historical) A monetary value assigned to a person based on their social rank, representing the compensation to be paid by an offender to the victim’s family in the event of unlawful killing.
    • Sad lays were sung about the beset king,
      the vicious raids and ravages of Grendel,
      [...] how he would never
      parley or make peace with any Dane
      nor stop his death-dealing nor pay the death-price.1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 7

Forms of death-price

pluraldeath-prices

Questions about death-price

What does death-price mean?
Death-price means a monetary value assigned to a person based on their social rank, representing the compensation to be paid by an offender to the victim’s family in the event of unlawful killing.
What part of speech is death-price?
Death-price is a noun.
What is the plural of death-price?
The plural of death-price is death-prices.

Words near death-price in the dictionary

  1. death-messengers
  2. death-name
  3. death-names
  4. death-of-man
  5. death-pit
  6. death-price
  7. death-prices
  8. death-rattle
  9. death-rattles
  10. death-ray
  11. death-rays

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: death-price (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-price.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/death-price. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.