FATALITY

Pronunciation (US):

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IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does fatality mean? 

• FATALITY (noun)
  The noun FATALITY has 2 senses:

1. a death resulting from an accident or a disaster

2. the quality of being able to cause death or fatal disasters

  Familiarity information: FATALITY used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FATALITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A death resulting from an accident or a disaster

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural events

Synonyms:

fatality; human death

Context example:

a decrease in the number of automobile fatalities

Hypernyms ("fatality" is a kind of...):

death; decease; expiry (the event of dying or departure from life)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "fatality"):

killing; violent death (an event that causes someone to die)

casualty; fatal accident (an accident that causes someone to die)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The quality of being able to cause death or fatal disasters

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("fatality" is a kind of...):

deadliness; lethality (the quality of being deadly)

Derivation:

fatal (bringing death)

 Context examples 

Samples from four of the fatalities were sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Liberian medical officials were stumped.

(Experts Link Fatal Mystery Illness in Liberia to Meningitis Bacteria, VOA)

As of 2003 when this Landsat 7 image was taken, more than 5,000 people have attempted to repeat their feat with only 1,600 successes and 175 fatalities.

(Everest, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Yes, that was ever the hour of fatality at Thornfield.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi noted on Monday, the fatalities were all unvaccinated.

(Samoan government temporarily shuts down for nationwide measles vaccination drive, Wikinews)

“You travelled to seek happiness, but a fatality seems to pursue you. And poor Clerval—”

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

It was found necessary to clear the entire piers from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities of the night would have been increased manifold.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

It accounts for the greatest number of deaths from malignancies of the female genital tract and is the fifth leading cause of cancer fatalities in women.

(Ovarian Carcinoma, NCI Thesaurus)

In Palu, although early reporting blamed most of the estimated 2,000 fatalities on a tsunami, surveys soon showed that soil-liquefaction landslides caused at least as much damage as the ocean waves did.

(NASA Map Reveals a New Landslide Risk Factor, NASA)

But the principle always failed us by some curious fatality, and we never could hit any medium between redness and cinders.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)