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Glite Dictionary
😶 Extremely 🧑‍🦳 Like death ☠️ Deadly
deathly

deathly

3 6.8
Able to cause death or serious harm
  • adjective
  • /ˈdɛθli/
: mortal
  • Doctors were mystified as to what was causing this otherwise healthy forty-nine-year-old man to become so deathly ill.
  • deathly ill

As if the chaos the Gnaws Wood police was not just the drunken murderous rowdiness of San Francisco, but the deathly destruction of Shiloh and Antietam.

Examples

  • Besides, she was deathly afraid to let go of his hand.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • If you missed my class, you must be deathly ill.

    Raise Your Voice (2004)

  • Winter can be deathly cold, even in North Carolina.

    Fiction book (1997)

  • You know I'm deathly afraid of heights, right?

    I Will Follow You Into the Dark (2012)

  • Liburd concluded that most others became deathly ill.

    Academic text (2000)

  • After the intense game, the player felt deathly exhausted and was unable to stand.

  • The poison in the spider's bite can be deathly, leading to serious health issues if untreated.

  • He was warned that without treatment, the disease could become deathly serious.

Synonyms

deadly
vsdeathly
543 2.8

Able to cause death or serious harm

focuses simply on causing death without extra intensity
fatal
vsdeathly
224 3.7

Causing a person's death

is about causing death or being capable rather than a definite result
lethal
vsdeathly
193 4.8

Able to cause death, for example by a weapon or poison

is the general term not limited to technical or weapon contexts
mortal
vsdeathly
26 6.0

Able to cause death

has identical meaning and no practical difference

Antonyms

safe
∞ 1.0

Not likely to be harmed or in danger

harmless
231 1.0

Not able to hurt people or things

How Deadly

fatal
224 3.7
deathly
3 6.8
dangerous
∞ 1.5
hazardous
98 5.2
harmless
231 1.0

Surface Forms

deathly positive

Morphology

deathly = death (semi-transparent) = death + ly

Formally the same noun + '-ly' derivation, but the sense 'causing death' is more typically expressed by 'deadly' and reflects a semantic shift that is not reliably inferable from the components.

Etymology

Deathly comes from death + -ly, and it has also been used to mean 'likely to cause death'. So a deathly illness is one that is very dangerous and could kill someone.