Dictionary

underlife en · NOUN

Pronunciation

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Etymology

From under- + life.

Meanings

1. Life concealed from common knowledge.
   • And I have gathered that Ford talked to Mary Worthington, not in so frank a strain but to the same more generalised effect, about that perpetual bother of sex which so afflicts the unacknowledged underlives of civilised people. 1917, J. D. Beresford, Kenneth Richmond, chapter 5, in W. E. Ford: A Biography, New York: George H. Doran, pages 94–95:
   • 1951, John Cowper Powys, Porius (published 2007), It pushed him on to search into, to try to understand, to seek to share the power of this extraordinary being, the extent of whose underlife was so much larger than his own.

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