predead

English

Etymology

From pre- +‎ dead.

Adjective

predead (not comparable)

1. Alternative form of pre-dead
   • 1984, Mark Christensen, Cameron Stauth -, The Sweeps: Behind the Scenes in Network TV, page 356:

     Ads that had created the most visually sophisticated audience on earth: the American TV viewer. For such an audience, Radler knew, the shows being churned out by the networks were . . . predead.

   • 1988, Joseph Hynes, The art of the real: Muriel Spark's novels, page 96:

     In sum, the fact that beings are neither Being nor capable of nonbeing is chastening — but sadness would seem considerably alleviated by the realization that (contra Sartre's No Exit) inability to exist in every way as in our predead days we wanted to exist is no block to awareness, choice, and change for the better, the natural.

   • 1994, Terry C. Johnston, Winter Rain, page 28:

     All that came bubbling up from his memory, seeping through remembrances of long winter nights suffering with the predead stench of the human sties the Yankees called prison cells at Rock Island in Illinois.

   • 2009, John Hausdoerffer, Catlin's Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics, page 113:

     Tammany members could visualize Indian contemporaries — the challenging savages on the border — as simply predead Indians who, upon dying, would become historical, locked in a grand narrative of inevitable American progress.

   • 2011, Suzanne Braun Levine, The Woman's Guide to Second Adulthood:

     There are two types of human entities— the dead and the predead, so while you're waltzing from predead to dead, have a lot of kids in your life, laugh a lot (because life is ridiculous), have a lot of sex until the walls rattle, and have a good time.

   • 2013, Chuck Palahniuk, Doomed, page 10:

     To you predead people. like it or not, postalive people are not your bitches.

Noun

predead pl (plural only)

1. Alternative form of pre-dead
   • 1997, October - Issues 79-82, page 23:

     The antifemale violence implicit in such targettings of the sex appeal of the inorganic is made explicit in the everyday identification of fashion victim as zombie, the predead or undead (one of the recurrent "signatures" both of the serial killer and his victims).

   • 2010, Robert Olmstead, Far Bright Star, page 152:

     He asked after the hand mirror and in the mirror he learned his eyes were shoe black and his stitched face gaunt and worn down as the predead.

Anagrams

• dreaped