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Glite Dictionary
sine die

sine die

1 9.9
With no date set to meet again
  • idiom
  • /ˈsaɪni ˈdaɪ/
  • Formal
translation icon : sine die
  • The legislative elections scheduled for 27 June were suspended sine die.

Examples

  • After much debate, the committee decided to adjourn sine die, with no plans to reconvene.

  • Congress was dissolved sine die and is now essentially a corporate Congress.

    Blog text (31)

  • I hereby declare this court is adjourned sine die.

    Inherit the Wind (1960)

  • The assembly was closed sine die, leaving no date set for a future meeting.

  • The event was postponed sine die, as no agreement could be reached on a new date.

Surface Forms

sine die positive

Morphology

sine + die

This is a Latin legal phrase (literally 'without a day') borrowed into English; its constituents are not English vocabulary items that a B1 learner will reliably know, and the meaning 'indefinitely / without fixing a date' is a conventional, language-specific usage. Even if a learner guesses 'sine' = without from other languages, the token 'die' will likely be misread as the English verb 'to die' or otherwise not recognized as 'day', so the overall meaning is not derivable from apparent constituents.

Etymology

Sine die comes from Latin and literally means 'without a day', because sine means 'without' and die means 'day'. So it was used when a meeting or court session was ended with no new date, and today sine die means 'indefinitely'.