on someone's deathbed
30
6.8
- idiom
- My grandmother whispered her last wishes to me on her deathbed.
Examples
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He will never marry again, because that is what he vowed to Mama on her deathbed.
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Do you know what he said to me on his deathbed?
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Remember what we promised him on his deathbed?
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My mother was literally on her deathbed when he left home.
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An old man on his deathbed remembers the summer he fell in love.
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On his deathbed, he revealed your existence to Louis and your mother.
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A farmer was on his deathbed and gathered his sons around... ...to discuss the inheritance.
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She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth.
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She took his first embraces, she bore his children, and she laid pennies on his eyes when he lay on his deathbed.
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Your mother's last dying request... ...on her deathbed was that you didn't run off with that slime Frankie Adato.
Synonyms
7
7.6
Very ill and almost dying
4
8.0
Almost dying because of old age or poor health
Antonyms
How Near Death
Surface Forms
Morphology
The noun 'deathbed' is transparently composed from 'death' + 'bed' and clearly evokes the bed on which a person is dying; combined with the preposition 'on' and a possessive, the phrase directly means 'during the final moments of someone's life.' This composition follows straightforward compositional semantics and similar constructions exist cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words can readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The phrase on someone's deathbed comes from the simple image of a person lying in a bed at the time of death. So, it means 'during the last moments of someone's life'.