necrology
Americannoun
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necrologies
plural
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a list of persons who have died within a certain time.
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a notice of death; obituary.
noun
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a list of people recently dead
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a less common word for obituary
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of necrology
Explanation
A necrology is a list of people who have died, or an obituary of a single person. If someone is writing a history of one battle of the Civil War, they might attempt a necrology of every soldier who died. If the newspaper publishes a list of passengers who died in a plane crash, you can call it a necrology. And the obituary, or death notice, of your great grandfather who died at the age of 110, can also be called a necrology — although obituary is much more common. Necrology was used more often in the eighteenth century, and it comes from necro-, "death," from the Greek nekros, "corpse."
Vocabulary lists containing necrology
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
How woefully The Post covers necrology news, the dead beat.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 19, 2021
Whitman’s name doesn’t come up in Vanessa Gould’s “Obit,” a documentary about The Times’s necrology team at work.
From New York Times ● Apr. 25, 2017
I mean, no Rivette in the necrology montage?
From New York Times ● Feb. 29, 2016
One of the most popular improvements was a necrology, a list of the names of the dead, which began appearing in the third edition.
From "An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793" by Jim Murphy
All the phantoms of this necrology were passing before my eyes!
From A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) by Jules Verne
A searchable database of necrologies retrieves different spellings of family names.
From Time Magazine Archive
As a rule the necrologies find me personally interested—when they treat of old stagers.
From Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 5 (1901-1906) by Albert Bigelow Paine
But of these gentlemen I find no account in the fashionable necrologies.
From Bibliomania; or Book-Madness A Bibliographical Romance by Thomas Frognall Dibdin
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
