dead of

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Idioms and Phrases

The period of greatest intensity of something, such as darkness or cold. For example, I love looking at seed catalogs in the dead of winter, when it's below zero outside . The earliest recorded use of dead of night , for “darkest time of night,” was in Edward Hall's Chronicle of 1548: “In the dead of the night ... he broke up his camp and fled.” Dead of winter , for the coldest part of winter, dates from the early 1600s.

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

"When they started to look at them with a microscope, they discovered plenty of microbes. Many were dead, of course, but others were alive and reactivated very, very rapidly. Now we call this process of reactivation "resurrection," and this word is used on purpose because, in fact, they can be in a kind of sustained life state for millions of years. In fact, bacteria can remain frozen and alive for at least 3.5 million years, and they recover very rapidly, they reactivate," Yarzábal told Salon.

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A researcher, preferably in the dead of night, would trek to those areas and play a recording of the owl’s call — and see if it answers.

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She’s devastated when, early in the novel, she finds Nathan dead of a heroin overdose.

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The officers had come, as Jayne had long dreaded they would, to tell her that her 29-year-old son was dead of an overdose.

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"If armed men arrive in the dead of the night to a pensioner… and he ends up being shot, there is a fear it could happen elsewhere," he said.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

dead nettle dead-on

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