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salto mortale

salto mortale noun: a dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome.

Noun

salto mortale (plural salti mortali)

  1. A dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome.
  2. (figuratively) A risky, dangerous or crucial step or undertaking.
    • I take shame to myself…for having been more taken by the salti mortali* of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured.
      * Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which...1867 July, William Dean Howells, “At Padua”, in The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume XX, № CXVII, chapter i, page 25/1
    • The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies, its corybantic bacchanalia, held its mad salto mortale over the grave of crucified humanity.1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress

Forms of salto mortale

pluralsalti mortali

Origin of salto mortale

From Italian salto (“leap”) + mortale (“deadly”).

Questions about salto mortale

What does salto mortale mean?
Salto mortale means a dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome.
What part of speech is salto mortale?
Salto mortale is a noun.
What is the plural of salto mortale?
The plural of salto mortale is salti mortali.

Words near salto mortale in the dictionary

  1. saltmouths
  2. saltmyrtle
  3. saltness
  4. Saltney
  5. salto
  6. salto mortale
  7. saltometer
  8. saltometers
  9. Salton City
  10. Salton Sea
  11. Salton Sea Beach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: salto mortale (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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