Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The human skull as a symbol of mortality or death.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The skull of a human skeleton, or a figure or painting representing such a skull.
- noun Specifically, in the sixteenth century, a ring with a death's-head on it.
- noun A name of one of the saimiri or titi monkeys of South America, Chrysothrix sciureus.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A naked human skull as the emblem of death; the head of the conventional personification of death.
- noun (Zoöl.) a very large European moth (
Acherontia atropos ), so called from a figure resembling a human skull on the back of the thorax; -- called alsodeath's-head sphinx .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A human
skull , as symbol ofdeath .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a human skull (or a representation of a human skull) used as a symbol of death
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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His large gray eyes were mainly responsible for this feeling, and they blazed out feverishly from what was almost a death's-head, so thin was the face, the skin of which was a ghastly, dull, dead white.
Chapter II 2010
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And all the while, like a death's-head at the feat, silent and motionless, her own unfortunate boy sat and stared at me across the table.
Confession 2010
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As the favoured signature of the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, the death's-head hawk moth is a harbinger of pestilence and death.
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The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon.
Chapter 39 2010
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Sure, politicians like Coburn and Burr can dress them up, but you'd recognize those death's-head grins anywhere.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Burr/Coburn Medicare Plan: 10 Deceptions - And A Free-Market "Death Panel" RJ 2012
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The death's-head hawk-moth, made famous by the Silence Of The Lambs film, has turned up at the RSPB's Arne nature reserve in Dorset, as well as in Plymouth.
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The death's-head hawk moth is the largest moth to fly in Britain and has the ability to fly into beehives in search of honey without being stung.
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Daniel Hertzberg for The Wall Street Journal Colson Whitehead The rollicking gusto of some of the writing, with its overheated adjectives and over-the-top images, is hard to resist: It was the passionless, death's-head skull of a long-dead corpse, instinct with hellish life; and the glazed eyes swollen and bulbous betrayed the thing's blindness.
Instinct With Hellish Life James Kennedy 2011
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The death's-head, a forbiddingly charismatic insect with a distinctive skull pattern on its thorax, has been sighted along the south coast at Arne, Dorset, and in Plymouth, Devon, in what is proving to be a vintage autumn for exotic migratory moths.
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Sure, politicians like Coburn and Burr can dress them up, but you'd recognize those death's-head grins anywhere.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: The Burr/Coburn Medicare Plan: 10 Deceptions - And A Free-Market "Death Panel" RJ 2012
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