Word.ws English Dictionary

life-or-death

life-or-death adjective: of critical importance to the survival of a living organism.

Adjective

life-or-death (not comparable)

  1. Of critical importance to the survival of a living organism.
    • Good camoflouge is life or death for many animals in the wild.
  2. Having death as a possible or even likely outcome; perilous.
    • Ascending Mount Everest can be life or death for an inexperienced climber.
  3. (idiomatic) Of critical importance to the success of a particular endeavor.
    • Obtaining financing was a life-or-death matter for the research.

Forms of life-or-death

alternative formlife-and-death
alternative formlife or death

Questions about life-or-death

What does life-or-death mean?
Life-or-death means of critical importance to the survival of a living organism.
What part of speech is life-or-death?
Life-or-death is an adjective.

Words near life-or-death in the dictionary

  1. Life-like cellular automatons
  2. life-line
  3. life-lines
  4. life-long
  5. life-lore
  6. life-or-death
  7. life-preserver
  8. life-preservers
  9. life-ruining
  10. life-saver
  11. life-savers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: life-or-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.

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Cite this entry: “life-or-death.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/life-or-death. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.