Word.ws English Dictionary

sit on death's doorstep

sit on death's doorstep verb: to be on the brink of death; to be almost dead.

Verb

sit on death's doorstep (third-person singular simple present sits on death's doorstep, present participle sitting on death's doorstep, simple past and past participle sat on death's doorstep)

  1. To be on the brink of death; to be almost dead.
    • You can sit on death's doorstep, And rest your weary bones.1982, Lyrical Iowa, page 109
    • From the Otherworld she hopes, as a shaman, to retrieve the soul of her dead or dying intended husband, who sits on Death's doorstep.2002, Dissertation Abstracts International, page 3778

Forms of sit on death's doorstep

third-person singular presentsits on death's doorstep
present participlesitting on death's doorstep
past participlesat on death's doorstep
pastsat on death's doorstep

Questions about sit on death's doorstep

What does sit on death's doorstep mean?
Sit on death's doorstep means to be on the brink of death; to be almost dead.
What part of speech is sit on death's doorstep?
Sit on death's doorstep is a verb.
What is the past tense of sit on death's doorstep?
The past tense of sit on death's doorstep is sat on death's doorstep.

Words near sit on death's doorstep in the dictionary

  1. sit loose
  2. sit loosely
  3. sit off
  4. sit on
  5. sit on a tack
  6. sit on death's doorstep
  7. sit on it
  8. sit on one's arse
  9. sit on one's ass
  10. sit on one's hands
  11. sit on one's laurels

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sit on death's doorstep (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: “sit on death's doorstep.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sit_on_death%27s_doorstep. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.