Black Death
- noun
- /blæk dɛθ/
- The Black Death was a natural scourge on humankind; Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent "man's inhumanity to man."
Billy died of the Black Death, I shouldn't call it that, and hovered like a winged horseman.
- Billy died of the Black Death, I shouldn't call it that, and hovered like a winged horseman.
- The way the Black Death spreads is that the the people on the side of the Golden Horde are dying of the Black Death.
- Whenever we say they and they said they, they, they, they said in order to understand the financially, you need to understand Genghis Khan and the Black Death.
- Corporate America is, in my estimation, little more than a Petri dish designed to germinate the next big plague a la COVID, Spanish influenza and the Black Death.
- And then, you know, the Black Death, you know, has has has a hand in that somewhere along the line.
- Pandemics can be a that the Black Death was a terrific disruptor bits bit steep in its cost, but still wars, revolutions, things like that.
Examples
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There is ample evidence of population recovery following the Black Death, which is in line with our model predictions.
Academic text (2018) -
Today it's best known as the black death, or the plague.
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The interesting thing about the Black Death is that, in its destructive wake,
Blog text (11) -
Another plague, known to history as the Black Death, swept Europe in the 14th century, killing perhaps a third of the continent's population.
Academic text (2011) -
The Black Death swept through Europe in the fourteenth century, killing one-third of the total population.
Academic text (2000) -
The Black Death, a huge wave of epidemics of bubonic plague, spread across Europe during 1347-1353 CE.
Academic text (2013) -
The Black Death devastated communities across Europe in the 14th century, leading to a significant decline in the population.
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Historians estimate that the Black Death resulted in the deaths of approximately 25 million people throughout Europe.
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During the Black Death, many towns were left deserted as the epidemic claimed countless lives across the continent.
Synonyms
A very serious disease that spreads quickly and kills many people
A very large disease outbreak that kills many people
A serious disease that spreads and causes fever and painful swollen glands
A disease that kills many people quickly, for example the plague
A severe disease in the Middle Ages that spread across Europe and killed millions
Surface Forms
Morphology
Black + death
Although the constituents 'black' and 'death' are individually known, the phrase is a proper-name referring to a specific historical epidemic (the 14th-century bubonic plague), which a B1 learner cannot reliably infer from the words alone. 'Death' is transparent but 'black' here is metaphorical and the precise historical/medical reference is unpredictable without prior knowledge, so the overall expression is not compositionally derivable.
Etymology
Black Death may come from the dark, swollen lumps that appeared on people and made their skin look black, and from the many deaths the disease caused. So the name came to mean that terrible plague which killed millions.