lethal

Plurallethals

1. 1
   adjective

   Causing or capable of causing death; deadly in effect.

   A lethal dose of the drug can stop the heart within minutes.

   Recruits were trained to handle lethal weapons with great care.

   Similardeadly, fatal, mortal

   Oppositeharmless, nonlethal, safe, innocuous

   Note

   The Latin behind it is lētālis, from lētum, "death." The h crept in later through a mistaken link with Greek lḗthē, "oblivion," and English kept that spelling. Despite meaning "deadly," the adjective is gradable, so one thing can be more lethal than another. The Economist in 2013 judged the machine gun so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparing them was meaningless.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A weapon capable of causing death.

   He reached for a lethal concealed beneath his coat.

   The smugglers' armory was stocked with lethals of every kind.

   Note

   Here the adjective does duty as a noun, and an ordinary countable one: you can carry a lethal, and an arsenal holds lethals. Its opposite, non-lethal, follows the same pattern. That pairing is where the noun is most at home, sorting weapons into those meant to kill and those meant only to stop.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An allele that kills the organism in which it occurs.

   Geneticists traced the disorder to a recessive lethal carried by both parents.

   Dominant lethals are usually eliminated within a single generation.

   Note

   Geneticists name the gene itself, not the condition it causes: a lethal is an allele, carried and passed on like any other. The useful distinction is dominant versus recessive. A recessive lethal can persist unnoticed in heterozygous carriers for generations. A dominant lethal kills the organism that carries it, so it is purged from a population almost as soon as it appears.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   A long-chain alcohol of the paraffin series that is extracted from spermaceti and forms white crystals.

   Early soap makers prized lethal for the smooth texture it gave their products.

   When cooled, the purified lethal settled into glossy white crystals.

   Note

   A separate word that only shares the spelling of the "deadly" adjective. It is a chemist's abbreviation of "lauric acid ethereal salt," named for the compound in which it occurs. The substance is the waxy white alcohol from spermaceti now generally known as cetyl alcohol. As a material name it is uncountable: a chemist speaks of some lethal, never of a lethal.

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