Dictionary

pre-dead en · ADJ

Etymology

From pre- + dead.

Meanings

1. (not-comparable) Not yet dead.
   • As always Mullen speaks for the dead, the pre-dead, and the after-dead: 2012, Claudia Rankine, Lisa Sewell, Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century, page 214:
2. (not-comparable) Not yet dead. ▸ Dying; moribund; terminally ill.
   • If new legal considerations regarding treatment of the pre-dead are introduced, then the provisions ought to allow individuals to express prior wishes as to their preferences for how they wish to be cared for in pre-dead states, or even to allow for a 'conscience clause' such that they or their advocates could reject such a notion whilst retaining no right of veto over the existing cardiorespiratory and brain stem considerations of death. 2013, Dr Simon Woods, Ms Lynn Hagger, A Good Death?: Law and Ethics in Practice:
   • The anchors that hold him to earth pull loose, a common phenomenon among the pre-dead. 1999, Joe Jackson, William F. Burke (Jr.), Dead Run:
   • Few of us have enough experience with severe disability to make an informed choice in an advance directive, but clearly, having a significant disability does not mean you are "pre-dead." 2005, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Reform. Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, Federal health programs and those who cannot care for themselves, page 55:
   • He was feeling better now and had upgraded his own condition from pre-dead to feeble. 2000, Doug J. Swanson, House of Corrections, page 90:
   • Echoing this constellation, a version of Mcllvaine, the narrator of The Waterworks, reappears in City of God, where he is visited by "the Reverend Dr. Thomas Pemberton" in a hospice replete with "the generic blank stares of the pre-dead". 2009, Michael Wutz, Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology:
   • Garbage removal in and around private pre-dead rats initially low. 1969, Pesticides - Volume 3, page 48:
3. (not-comparable) Not yet dead. ▸ Doomed to die soon;
   • I wanted to produce a straightforward, unsentimental view of a place that has been shrouded in mystery, to offer the human face of these men, the pre-dead. 1997, Texas death row, page 7:
   • The pre-dead humans who would meet the tips of her claws if they approached Strider again. 2011, Gena Showalter, The Darkest Surrender:
   • Smith also worked a transformation of the living into the pre-dead in a rare field report aired on The Fox Report on August 31. 2015, Bernie Cook, Flood of Images: Media, Memory, and Hurricane Katrina, page 56:
   • he had enough time to marry and rear children, but that given statistics and his lengthy family history, life beyond 45 seemed unlikely. After 40, he began to view his life as "pre-dead." 1994, John S. Rolland, Families, Illness, and Disability:
   • And he was retired—or pre-dead, as he preferred to call it. 2015, T. C. Boyle, The Harder They Come:
   • He attacks the notion of a "just war" and the sacrifice it demands in Sabra youth: "We are all pre-dead in those eighty million battles." 2006, Nitsah Ben-Ari, Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Hebrew Literature, page 66:
4. (not-comparable) Not yet dead. ▸ Alive
   • In effect, we are all pre-ill, if not virtually pre-dead. 2003, Giles Emerson, City of Sin, page 229:
   • That statement presupposes that everyone in the world agrees with the nonsensical "pre-born human." Why not say "pre-dead human" since we are all going to die at some point? 2001, Scott Stein, C P Kaiser, When Falls the Coliseum, page 91:
   • Then the man told Mamet what he fed the anaconda: "pre-dead chickens." 1984, New York - Volume 17, page 41:
   • Once you're dead it's easier. But then, likely, you are dead and haven't realized it. Only the pre-dead insist on linearity's sad traps. 2004, Pretext - Issues 9-11, page 15:

Forms