Word.ws English Dictionary

underlife

underlife noun: life concealed from common knowledge.

Noun

underlife (plural underlives)

  1. Life concealed from common knowledge.
    • And I have gathered that Ford talked to Mary Worthington, not in so frank a strain but to the same more generalised effect, about that perpetual bother of sex which so afflicts the unacknowledged underlives of civilised people.1917, J. D. Beresford, Kenneth Richmond, chapter 5, in W. E. Ford: A Biography, New York: George H. Doran, pages 94–95
    • It pushed him on to search into, to try to understand, to seek to share the power of this extraordinary being, the extent of whose underlife was so much larger than his own.1951, John Cowper Powys, Porius (published 2007)

Forms of underlife

pluralunderlives

Origin of underlife

From under- + life.

Questions about underlife

What does underlife mean?
Underlife means life concealed from common knowledge.
What part of speech is underlife?
Underlife is a noun.
What is the plural of underlife?
The plural of underlife is underlives.

Words near underlife in the dictionary

  1. underlies
  2. underliest
  3. underlieth
  4. underlieutenant
  5. underlieutenants
  6. underlife
  7. underlight
  8. underlighting
  9. underlights
  10. underlimbed
  11. underlimit

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: underlife (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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