deadline
Pluraldeadlines
Verbdeadlines, deadlining, deadlined
Pluraldeadlines
Formsdeadlines, deadlining, deadlined
- 1A time limit, usually a date, on or before which something must be completed.
The reporter filed her story just minutes before the deadline.
Missing the deadline could cost the company the entire contract.
Note
The everyday meaning is the youngest one. The word first named a line that does not move, such as one used in angling, and then, in American usage, a prison boundary no inmate could cross. Now the line is a point in time, and English meets it or makes it: meet the deadline, make this deadline. Closing date is the plainer synonym.
- 2To take a piece of equipment out of service, such as grounding an aircraft, so it cannot perform its mission.
Inspectors will deadline any vehicle that fails to meet maintenance standards.
Maintenance crews deadlined three aircraft pending engine inspections.
Note
Military maintenance turns the noun into a regular verb: deadlines, deadlining, deadlined. It takes the equipment as its object, as in deadline a vehicle, and it sits comfortably in the passive, as in three aircraft were deadlined. Outside military and government writing, grounded or taken out of service is the plainer choice.
- 3A boundary line around a prison camp that prisoners would be shot for crossing.
Anyone who crossed the deadline was shot without warning by the tower guards.
Prisoners learned to stay well clear of the deadline at all times.
Note
An American prison usage, and the darkest of the word's literal lines. Here dead no longer means "motionless." It names the fate of whoever crossed. The meaning belongs to historical writing about prisons and prison camps. When describing such places, context needs to make clear that the line is a physical boundary, or readers will hear only the modern time limit.
Less common meanings
- 4A guide line marked on a plate used in a printing press.
The compositor aligned the text to the deadline marked on the plate.
A faint deadline guided where the printed area began.
Note
A printer's literal line, and a term that has since fallen out of use. In older writing about presses, the word names a visible mark on the plate, not a moment on the calendar. That makes it easy to misread, because printing is just where the time-limit sense feels at home. In modern prose, guide line says the same thing without the ambiguity.
- 5A fixed line that does not move.
Engineers laid out a deadline along the ridge as a reference that would not shift.
The fence followed a deadline marked decades earlier.
Note
Here the compound is read at face value: dead in its sense of "motionless," applied to a line. One early setting was angling, a line that stays put. The usage now survives only in older texts. A present-day reader will take deadline as a time limit, so fixed line is the safer phrase when this meaning is wanted.
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Origin
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, early usage referred to lines that do not move, such as one used in angling, and slightly later American usage referred to a boundary in a prison that prisoners must not cross. There is only indirect evidence linking the "due date" sense to this use during the American Civil War. By 1917 the term appeared as a printing term for a guideline on a press beyond which text would not print, and three years later it was used in publishing for the time after which material would not make it into a newspaper.