mortality

noun

Etymology: From Old French mortalite, from Latin mortālitās, from mortālis (“relating to death”), from mors (“death”); equivalent to mortal + -ity.

1. The state or quality of being mortal.

   “[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?”

2. The state or quality of being mortal.

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

3. The state or quality of being mortal.

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

   “[…] 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 […]”

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

   “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 […]”

6. Death.

   “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.”

7. Mortals 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.”