Word.ws English Dictionary

jaws of death

jaws of death noun: a very narrowly avoided fatal or near-fatal situation.

Noun

jaws of death pl (plural only)

  1. (figuratively, plural, plural-only, poetic, cliche) A very narrowly avoided fatal or near-fatal situation.
    • "And then at last I see him, and behold, my chance is gone but by a hair's breadth even before I have it, for he is in the very jaws of death, whence no power of mine can draw him."1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC

Questions about jaws of death

What does jaws of death mean?
Jaws of death means a very narrowly avoided fatal or near-fatal situation.
What part of speech is jaws of death?
Jaws of death is a noun.

Words near jaws of death in the dictionary

  1. jaws
  2. jaws away
  3. jaws down
  4. jaws harp
  5. jaws harps
  6. jaws of death
  7. jaws of life
  8. jaws' harp
  9. jaws' harps
  10. Jaws'-harp
  11. Jaws'-harps

Source and license

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