English

Alternative forms

• deader than a doornail

Adjective

dead as a doornail

1. (simile) Unquestionably dead. Used for both inanimate objects and once living beings.

   I picked up the phone, but the line was dead as a doornail.

   We finally found John's cat run over in the next road. It was as dead as a doornail.

   • 1843, Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, stave 1,

     Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

     Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

See also

• dead as a doorknob
• dead as a dodo
• dead as a dodo bird

Translations

References

• "Dead as a doornail" in Michael Quinion, Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds, 2004.

1. ↑ G M Trevelyan (1944) English Social History