Deadline

How to spell deadline

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce deadline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deadline mean?

1. nounThe latest time or date by which something must be finished or submitted.

Deadline in a sentence

• The report missed its deadline by two days.

• The tax deadline falls at the end of January.

Where does deadline come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound of the native English words 'dead' and 'line', both of Germanic origin, and its literal sense is older and grimmer than the modern office one. During the American Civil War, a 'deadline' was a real line drawn around a military prison; any prisoner who crossed it could be shot dead, so the word fused 'dead' with 'line' to mean a boundary you could not safely pass. By the early twentieth century printers and newspaper editors had borrowed the term for the fixed time by which copy had to be finished, treating the clock as a line that must not be crossed. From journalism it spread into general business and academic use, where it now simply means a final time limit for completing work. Because both parts are plain everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the modern term is easy to write, and the surprise is just how literal the original 'dead' once was.

How the word is built

• dead (no longer living; absolute, fixed)
• line (a boundary or limit)