Word.ws English Dictionary

death drive

death drive noun: the drive toward death and self-destruction.

Noun

death drive (plural death drives)

  1. The drive toward death and self-destruction.
    • The connection between the death drive and the symbolic order is a constant with Lacan, but we can differentiate the various stages of his teaching precisely by reference to the different modes of articulation of the death drive and the signifier: […]1989, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso, →ISBN, page 131

Synonyms of death drive

Forms of death drive

pluraldeath drives

Origin of death drive

Calque of German Todestrieb.

Questions about death drive

What does death drive mean?
Death drive means the drive toward death and self-destruction.
What part of speech is death drive?
Death drive is a noun.
What is the plural of death drive?
The plural of death drive is death drives.

Words near death drive in the dictionary

  1. death disc
  2. death discs
  3. death diving
  4. death door
  5. death doors
  6. death drive
  7. death drives
  8. death duties
  9. death duty
  10. Death Eater
  11. Death Eaters

Source and license

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