death door
death door noun: a door to the outside from the parlor or hall to allow for the movement of the dead; from the time when the wealthy would host their wakes and funerals in their own homes. It is a supplementary door to the main doors of the home, unconnected from exterior stairs or walkways. The death door existed to allow for the dead to move through doors without needing to use the doorways used by the living.
Noun
death door (plural death doors)
- a door to the outside from the parlor or hall to allow for the movement of the dead; from the time when the wealthy would host their wakes and funerals in their own homes. It is a supplementary door to the main doors of the home, unconnected from exterior stairs or walkways. The death door existed to allow for the dead to move through doors without needing to use the doorways used by the living.
Forms of death door
| plural | death doors |
|---|
Origin of death door
From death + door from being a door used for the dead.
Questions about death door
- What does death door mean?
- Death door means a door to the outside from the parlor or hall to allow for the movement of the dead; from the time when the wealthy would host their wakes and funerals in their own homes. It is a supplementary door to the main doors of the home, unconnected from exterior stairs or walkways. The death door existed to allow for the dead to move through doors without needing to use the doorways used by the living.
- What part of speech is death door?
- Death door is a noun.
- What is the plural of death door?
- The plural of death door is death doors.
Words near death door in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: death door (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “death door.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/death_door. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.