mortality

noun

1. 1

   The state or quality of being mortal. The state of being susceptible to death.

   [H]er minde remembreth her mortalitie, / vvhat ſo is fayreſt ſhall to earth returne.

   Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o’er-sways their power, / How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

   1714, Alexander Pope, letter to John Gay in Letters of Mr. Pope, and Several Eminent Persons, London, 1735, Volume 2, p. 208, I have been perpetually troubled with sickness of late, which has made me so melancholy that the Immortality of the Soul has been my constant Speculation, as the Mortality of my Body my constant Plague.

   “[…] Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality; / They spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay: / Open thine eyes and see.”

2. 2

   archaicThe state or quality of being mortal. The quality of being punishable by death.

   […] actions of Charity do alleviate, as I may say, and take off from the Mortality of the Sin.

3. 3

   archaicThe state or quality of being mortal. The quality of causing death.

   Hold therefore Angelo: / In our remoue, be thou at full, our selfe: / Mortallitie and Mercie in Vienna / Liue in thy tongue, and heart: Old Escalus / Though first in question, is thy secondary. / Take thy Commission.

   1685, Thomas Willis, Tract of Fevers, Chapter 15, in The London Practice of Physick, London: Thomas Basset and William Crooke, p. 626, […] the Fevers of Women in Child-bed; to wit, both the Lacteal, and that called Putrid, which, by reason of its Mortality, deserves to be call’d Malignant.

4. 4

   The number of deaths; and, usually and especially, the number of deaths per time unit (usually per year), expressed as a rate. Deaths resulting from an event (such as a war, epidemic or disaster).

   […] the Mortality was so great in the Yard or Alley, that there was no Body left to give Notice to the Buriers or Sextons, that there were any dead Bodies there to be bury’d.

   […] the doctors stood aghast at the swift mortality among the untended sufferers […]

   The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid air and fell like stones to the ground. […] The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous.

5. 5

   The number of deaths; and, usually and especially, the number of deaths per time unit (usually per year), expressed as a rate. The number of deaths per given unit of population over a given period of time.

   In foundling hospitals, and among the children brought up by parish charities the mortality is still greater than among those of the common people.

   Some of the objects of enquiry would be […] what was the comparative mortality among the children of the most distressed part of the community, and those who lived rather more at their ease […]

   And, even in peace and at home, what was the sanitary condition of the Army? The mortality in the barracks was, she found, nearly double the mortality in civil life.

   […] a drought year brought conditions especially favorable to the beetle and the mortality of elms went up 1000 per cent.

6. 6

   figurativeDeath.

   Why am I mockt with death, and length’nd out / To deathless pain? how gladly would I meet / Mortalitie my sentence, and be Earth / Insensible,

   Learn to bear your Husband’s Death like a reasonable Woman. ’Tis not the fashion, now-a-days so much as to affect Sorrow upon these Occasions. No Woman would ever marry, if she had not the Chance of Mortality for a Release.

   […] like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.

   […] the moldy odor of mortality hung wet in the air with the sulphurous fog […]

7. 7

   archaicMortals collectively.

   It is not fit Mortalitie should knowe / What his eternall prouidence decreed,

   [S]leepe seiz’d his weary eye, / That salues all care, to all mortality.

Forms

plural

mortalities