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death list

death list

1 9.3
A list of people someone plans to kill or hurt
  • noun
  • /dɛθ lɪst/
  • Offensive
translation icon : lista de personas a eliminar
  • We have placed 125 names on a death list.
  • name on a death list

Examples

Synonyms

hit list
vsdeath list
  • Offensive
17 7.8

A list of people marked to be harmed or killed, often by criminals

appears in contexts involving individuals or any group not only criminals

Antonyms

1.0

A place or condition that protects you from danger

974 1.0

Keeping people or things safe from harm

Surface Forms

death list singular
death lists plural

Morphology

death + list

The meaning 'a list of people targeted to be killed or harmed' is directly built from combining 'death' (end of life) with 'list' (a recorded sequence of names/items), so a B1 learner who knows both words would infer it denotes a list related to death — commonly understood as people expected to die or be killed. There is no strong idiomatic shift or metaphorical extension here, and similar noun+noun compounding patterns exist across languages, making the construction predictable.

Etymology

Death list comes from the image of a paper or document where names are written and marked for death, a list showing who is chosen to die. That's why the phrase means 'a list of people targeted to be killed or harmed'.