Word.ws English Dictionary

death of despair

death of despair noun: death resulting from a disease of despair.

Noun

death of despair (plural deaths of despair)

  1. Death resulting from a disease of despair.
    • The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called suicides as well as drug and alcohol-related deaths “deaths of despair.” Much of the conversation around deaths of despair has centered on middle-aged white Americans without college degrees, who have been dying in greater numbers. But the...2018 June 8, Sarah Zhang, “More Americans Are Dying By Suicide”, in The Atlantic, archived from the original on 13 Jul 2018
    • Income equality often features in popular discussion of deaths of despair and American ill health more generally.2020, Anne Case, Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 134

Forms of death of despair

pluraldeaths of despair

Origin of death of despair

Popularized by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in the context of their analysis of US capitalism.

Questions about death of despair

What does death of despair mean?
Death of despair means death resulting from a disease of despair.
What part of speech is death of despair?
Death of despair is a noun.
What is the plural of death of despair?
The plural of death of despair is deaths of despair.

Words near death of despair in the dictionary

  1. death nail
  2. death note
  3. death notes
  4. death notification
  5. death notifications
  6. death of despair
  7. death of the author
  8. death on
  9. death panel
  10. death panels
  11. death penalties

Source and license

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