deader

Pluraldeaders

1. 1
   adjectivecolloquialfigurativelyhumorous

   Comparative of dead.

   Once the headliner canceled, the whole festival felt deader than a ghost town.

   His career looked deader than ever after the scandal broke.

   Note

   A comparative that logic forbids: dead is usually not comparable, yet English grades it for emphasis and comedy. Burroughs's Oldwick, in Tarzan the Untamed (1920), reasons that an enemy "can't kill me any deader," and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) calls pioneer days "deader now than Camelot." The -er is the comparative suffix; the same spelling with the noun-making -er gives the noun for a corpse.

2. 2
   nouncolloquialhumorouscountable

   A person who is deceased, or who will shortly become so.

   Three deaders were laid out in the morgue by the time the sun came up.

   Step onto that ledge in this wind and you're a deader, the guide said flatly.

   Similargoner, corpse, stiff

   Note

   Here the -er is the occupational suffix of farmer and baker, stretched to mean simply someone who is dead, and the noun takes the regular plural deaders. The humor lies in its bluntness, and that bluntness can turn: in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) a little girl says "mother's a deader too" and drops her face into her pinafore.

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