LIVING DEATH

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does living death mean? 

• LIVING DEATH (noun)
  The noun LIVING DEATH has 1 sense:

1. a state of constant misery

  Familiarity information: LIVING DEATH used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LIVING DEATH (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A state of constant misery

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Hypernyms ("living death" is a kind of...):

miserableness; misery; wretchedness (a state of ill-being due to affliction or misfortune)

 Context examples 

“What can my life be now save a long-drawn living death?”

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Then Jim Hall went to his living death . . . and escaped.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

But there was little time for laughter in those days, what of our heavy work and of the awfulness of Wolf Larsen’s living death.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Oh, Adele will go to school—I have settled that already; nor do I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections of Thornfield Hall—this accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I have lived a living death which has left me an old and shattered man when I am but in my fortieth year.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The shark dropped back into the sea, helpless, yet with its full strength, doomed—to lingering starvation—a living death less meet for it than for the man who devised the punishment.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue- coated enemies.

(White Fang, by Jack London)