deathbed Hear it!

deathbed Definition

death·bed (-bed′)

noun

the bed on which a person dies

adjective

done or made in the last hours of life a deathbed will
deathbed Idioms

on one's deathbed

during or in the last hours of one's life
deathbed Usage Examples

Possessives

  • mother: Then on his mother's deathbed he decided to return to making music.
  • father: On his father's deathbed in 1782, Boswell succeeded to the family estate of Auchinleck.
  • uncle: IX Last belated figure in that grouping round my uncle's deathbed is my aunt.
  • brother: She was carried to her brother's deathbed by angels and reposed as an anchoress in the Apennines.

Modifies a noun

  • confession: More than thirty years later, in May 1988, a mystery man claimed his father had made a deathbed confession to the crime.
  • conversion: Labor's was a deathbed conversion to help save the party.
  • scene: There are no such constraints in radio drama, which over the past fortnight offered more deathbed scenes than the average TV medical soap.
  • mortgage: Try actually asking for physical material on the deathbed mortgage and then get back to us.
  • vision: With modern medical techniques, deathbed visions like these have become far less common.
  • grant: But Harold won the throne in 1066 through a deathbed grant by Edward and election by the nobles.
deathbed Quotes

Deathbed utterances, like suicide notes, are a powerful coinage, stamped byan awareness that words can outlive us.

—Plout, David