DEATH Death, n. Etym: [OE. deth, dea, AS. deá; akin to OS. d, D. dood, G. tod, Icel. dau, Sw. & Dan. död, Goth. daupus; from a verb meaning to die. See Die, v. i., and cf. Dead.]
1. The cessation of all vital phenomena without capability of resuscitation, either in animals or plants.
Note: Local death is going on at times and in all parts of the living body, in which individual cells and elements are being cast off and replaced by new; a process essential to life. General death is of two kinds; death of the body as a whole (somatic or systemic death), and death of the tissues. By the former is implied the absolute cessation of the functions of the brain, the circulatory and the respiratory organs; by the latter the entire disappearance of the vital actions of the ultimate structural constituents of the body. When death takes place, the body as a whole dies first, the death of the tissues sometimes not occurring until after a considerable interval. Huxley.
2. Total privation or loss; extinction; cessation; as, the death of memory. The death of a language can not be exactly compared with the death of a plant. J. Peile.
3. Manner of dying; act or state of passing from life. A death that I abhor. Shak. Let me die the death of the righteous. Num. xxiii. 10.
4. Cause of loss of life. Swiftly flies the feathered death. Dryden. He caught his death the last county sessions. Addison.
5. Personified: The destroyer of life, — conventionally represented as a skeleton with a scythe. Death! great proprietor of all. Young. And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that at on him was Death. Rev. vi. 8.
6. Danger of death. "In deaths oft." 2 Cor. xi. 23.
7. Murder; murderous character. Not to suffer a man of death to live. Bacon.
8. (Theol.)