Word.ws English Dictionary

undead

/ʌnˈdɛd/

undead adjective: not dead; alive.

Adjective

undead (not comparable)

  1. (dated) Not dead; alive.
  2. Pertaining to a corpse, though having qualities of life.
  3. (horror fiction) Being animate, though non-living.
    • When Anna and John finally break out of their self-centered bubbles to the shock that they must battle to the death an undead neighbor in a giant snowman costume, it plays like a poignant comment on movie teenagers' tendency to indulge their inner lives, ignorant of the world around them.2018 November 27, April Wolfe, “Anna And The Apocalypse is a Holiday-horror Cocktail of Singing, Maiming, and Clichés”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 04 Nov 2019

Noun

undead (countable and uncountable, plural undead or undeads)

  1. (horror and fantasy fiction) A creature that is undead; that is, dead but still animate.
    • Innocent VIII lent credibility to the actual existence of undeads, an action that perpetuated, and even stimulated, vampire hysteria.1997, Carol Margaret Davison, Paul Simpson-Housley, Bram Stoker's Dracula: sucking through the century, 1897-1997
    1. (plural, plural-only, with-definite-article, horror and fantasy fiction) Those who are undead.
      • In the zombie movie, an army of the undead accosted some unsuspecting teenagers.
      • "You will do me a service," the undead said to him.1983, Tanith Lee, The Wars of Vis

undead meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Telugu and Malayalam

undead in Tamil

இறக்காதவர்

undead in Urdu

غیر مردار

undead in Telugu

మరణించనిది, చచ్చిపోనిది

undead in Malayalam

മരണമില്ലാത്തവർ

Examples of undead in a sentence

  • Harley got devoured by the undead / Lurking down in some old wizard's tomb / You can say there's no such thing as zombies / But that's how Harley Warren met his doom2006, The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, “Harley Got Devoured by the Undead”, in An Even Scarier Solstice:
  • We’ve seen dragons reborn and armies of the undead.2017 July 16, Brandon Nowalk, “Chickens and dragons come home to roost on Game Of Thrones (newbies)”, in The Onion AV Club, archived from...

All 23 example sentences with undead

Forms of undead

Adjective
alternative formun-dead
Noun
pluralundead
pluralundeads

Plural of undead: undead

Origin of undead

From Middle English undede, equivalent to un- + dead. The first attestation is from around 1400. The term was revived, popularized, and imbued with supernatural connotations by its usage in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897).

Words formed from undead

Words that rhyme with undead

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about undead

What does undead mean?
Undead means not dead; alive.
What is undead in Tamil?
Undead in Tamil is இறக்காதவர். See Undead meaning in Tamil.
How do you use undead in a sentence?
Harley got devoured by the undead / Lurking down in some old wizard's tomb / You can say there's no such thing as zombies / But that's how Harley Warren met his doom
What part of speech is undead?
Undead can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce undead?
Undead is pronounced /ʌnˈdɛd/.

Words near undead in the dictionary

  1. undazed
  2. undazzle
  3. undazzled
  4. undazzles
  5. undazzling
  6. undead
  7. undeadened
  8. undeadliness
  9. undeadly
  10. undeadness
  11. undeads

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: undead (page history and authors); undead (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); undead (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); undead (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); undead (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-undead.wav.

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