Word.ws English Dictionary

death stare

death stare noun: a hateful or contemptuous look directed at someone; a dirty look.

Noun

death stare (plural death stares)

  1. (informal) A hateful or contemptuous look directed at someone; a dirty look.
    • “I thought it was bring-your-kid-to-work day,” replied Dad, clearly hoping a joke might soften them. He was wrong, as the two goons gave the man a death stare.2017, David Walliams [pseudonym; David Edward Williams], Bad Dad, London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, →ISBN
  2. A supposed stare that will cause death.
    • Handsome, with a Freud-like beard and piercing eyes, it was also said that he had perfected the death stare. Whenever he required the skeleton of some exotic beast to compare with his fossil bones, he would visit Basel Zoo and stare at the appropriate animal, which would soon thereafter shuffle off...2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 81
    Synonyms:
    death glare

Synonyms of death stare

Forms of death stare

pluraldeath stares

Questions about death stare

What does death stare mean?
Death stare means a hateful or contemptuous look directed at someone; a dirty look.
What part of speech is death stare?
Death stare is a noun.
What is the plural of death stare?
The plural of death stare is death stares.

Words near death stare in the dictionary

  1. death spiral
  2. death spirals
  3. death squad
  4. death squads
  5. death star
  6. death stare
  7. death stares
  8. death stars
  9. death stick
  10. death sticks
  11. death tax

Source and license

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