Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Full of slaughter; murderous; destructive.
  • Cruel; painful, as death.
  • Liable to death; mortal.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Full of death or slaughter; murderous; destructive; bloody.
  • adjective Liable to undergo death; mortal.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective archaic Full of death or slaughter.
  • adjective archaic Liable to undergo death.
  • adjective Resembling death.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

death +‎ -ful

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Examples

  • Sadly, although they share the longevity of REM, U2 have continued to push the envelope in terms of songs and sound whereas REM seem to have gotten lost in some kind of deathful suburban culdesac and stayed there which is a shame since both started out with the same amount of potential.

    Murmurs.com 2009

  • Sadly, although they share the longevity of REM, U2 have continued to push the envelope in terms of songs and sound whereas REM seem to have gotten lost in some kind of deathful suburban culdesac and stayed there which is a shame since both started out with the same amount of potential.

    Murmurs.com 2009

  • Sadly, although they share the longevity of REM, U2 have continued to push the envelope in terms of songs and sound whereas REM seem to have gotten lost in some kind of deathful suburban culdesac and stayed there which is a shame since both started out with the same amount of potential.

    Murmurs.com 2009

  • The third is a corrugated curiosity: George Cukor's 1936 "Romeo and Juliet," with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer as stiff, overage stand-ins for the deathless though deathful young lovers.

    The Best New DVDs 2007

  • But kept his standing still, till that a deathful dart

    The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation 2003

  • Such their dread strength, and such their deathful view.

    The Iliad of Homer 2003

  • Each favourite fowl he pounced with deathful sway,

    The Odyssey of Homer 2003

  • He hadn't known Evoe was still alive then, and he was in a deathful mood.

    In Other Worlds Attanasio, A. A. 1984

  • Jacob's body was on a narrow, disordered bed, and in the state of its deliverance: its eyes were aghast and its hands were clenched in deathful pangs.

    My Neighbors Stories of the Welsh People Caradoc Evans

  • Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity.

    Harvard Classics Volume 28 Essays English and American Various

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