LAST GASP

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does last gasp mean? 

• LAST GASP (noun)
  The noun LAST GASP has 1 sense:

1. the point of death or exhaustion or completion

  Familiarity information: LAST GASP used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LAST GASP (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The point of death or exhaustion or completion

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Context example:

the last gasp of the cold war

Hypernyms ("last gasp" is a kind of...):

end; ending (the point in time at which something ends)

 Context examples 

To the last gasp he would always be the master.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He had sunk down on the snow in the circle of his blood and was plainly in the last gasp.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

I slept two nights in the open air, and wandered about two days without crossing a threshold: but twice in that space of time did I taste food; and it was when brought by hunger, exhaustion, and despair almost to the last gasp, that you, Mr. Rivers, forbade me to perish of want at your door, and took me under the shelter of your roof.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace—that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

It would be impossible to explain to Eleanor the suspicions, from which the other had, in all likelihood, been hitherto happily exempt; nor could she therefore, in her presence, search for those proofs of the general's cruelty, which however they might yet have escaped discovery, she felt confident of somewhere drawing forth, in the shape of some fragmented journal, continued to the last gasp.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)