Deadliest

How to spell deadliest

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce deadliest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deadliest mean?

1. adjectiveMost capable of causing or most likely to cause death; the most lethal of a group.

Deadliest in a sentence

• The deadliest snakes in the region are kept behind reinforced glass.

• That summer brought the deadliest heatwave the city had recorded in decades.

Where does deadliest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the superlative form of the adjective deadly, which traces back to the Old English deadlic, built on dead, meaning 'no longer living', and the suffix -lic, which gave us the modern adjective ending -ly and originally signalled 'having the form or quality of'. In its earliest English use deadly carried the sense of 'subject to death, mortal', but over the centuries the emphasis shifted toward the active meaning we know today: 'capable of causing death'. The comparative and superlative were formed in the regular Germanic way by adding -er and -est, and because the base word already ends in -y, that -y softens to -i before the -est, which is the small spelling rule worth remembering here. The root dead is one of the oldest words in English and is closely related to die and death, all sharing the same ancient Germanic family. The whole word is therefore homegrown rather than borrowed, which is why it looks deceptively simple yet still trips writers up at the y-to-i join.

How the word is built

• dead (Old English dead: no longer living)
• -ly (adjective suffix from -lic: having the quality of)
• -est (superlative suffix)