noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   Pay drawn for soldiers, or others, really dead, whose names are kept on the payroll. countable, uncountable

   "c. 1621-1626, Philip Massinger, The Unnatural Combat O you commanders, / That, like me, have no dead-pays."

2. 2
   A dead soldier whose pay is illicitly claimed by another person. countable, uncountable

Example

More examples

"c. 1621-1626, Philip Massinger, The Unnatural Combat O you commanders, / That, like me, have no dead-pays."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.