Dictionary

deadland en · NOUN

Etymology

From dead + land.

Meanings

1. Wasteland; a desert or other place that does not support life.
   • Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. 1981, Stephen R. Donaldson, The power that preserves, →ISBN, page 390:
   • After the feverish days over deadland trails, — The repose of the gray-veiled and quiet-eyed twilight, The shimmering haze of the blue mountain valley, And the tranquil blue deep of the pool 1920, Lew Sarett, Many Many Moons: A Book of Wilderness Poems, page 46:
   • These must be the real deadlands. Here, there is no new growth to camouflage what the wars have done. 2005, Ellen Dee Davidson, Stolen Voices, →ISBN, page 99:
   • To return to the deadland of desolation and desert, to choke in its dust, to be lashed in the face with its wind, to feel a loneliness of time and space, a loneliness of emptiness, […] 1964, Michael Yatron, The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: A Novel, page 51:
   • He runs out of gas, and back on the ground meets up with a girl who is motoring through the deadland to meet her boss in Phoenix for some obscure technocratic purpose. 1970, The Month, page 304:
2. A place of death; a deadly land.
   • Nations that imprison, torture, assassinate, or drive their writers into exile fall into the deadlands of their own darkness. 2011, Ben Okri, A Time For New Dreams, →ISBN:
   • Does the hideous famine that gnaws the entrails with fiery fangs and burns up the wrenched and tortured tissues till the land sickens with its burden of deadland dying—does that show His pity? 1905, Frederick C Vernon-Harcourt, From Stage to Cross: The Record of a Rolling Stone, page 236:
   • A band of iron fastens around his neck, a long chain drags him to the ground, pulling him away from his people to the deadland of the south — to the land of strangers, unknown and terrifying. 1977, Meanjin - Volume 36, page 499:
3. The afterlife, especially in belief systems that do not include reward or punishment such as heaven and hell.
   • I could not find out whether the victims are intoxicated before execution : it is highly probable, as the African's, and especially the Yoruban's, object is to send these messengers to deadland in the best of tempers. 1866, Leone Levi, Annals of British Legislation: Digest of blue books - Volume 2, page 222:
   • They feared lest passing souls, which had just quitted the bodies of dying people, should enter their huts and carry off the souls of the inmates to deadland. 1990, Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: Taboo and the perils of the soul, page 70:
   • […] the unseen world of the spirits and ancestors. […] as messengers bearing questions to the "deadland" of royal ancestors. 2000, Francesca Piqué, Leslie H. Rainer, Palace Sculptures of Abomey: History Told on Walls, page 12:
   • “Do not do it,” said the god, “You cannot escape Ungit by going to the deadlands, for she is there also." 1956, C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces:
   • A conquering race would scarcely credit that its heroes would, after death, betake themselves to the deadland of the beaten and enslaved aborigines. 1946, Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins, page 77:

Forms