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Causing destruction; tending to bring about ruin, death, or devastation; ruinous; fatal; productive of serious evil; mischievous; pernicious; -- often with of or to; as, intemperance is destructive of health; evil examples are destructive to the morals of youth. Time's destructive power. Wordsworth. Destructive distill…

A destroyer. [R.] Fire, the destructive and the artificial death of things. Boyle.

One who, or that which, detects; a detecter. Shak. A deathbed's detector of the heart. Young. Bank-note detector, a publication containing a description of genuine and counterfeit bank notes, designed to enable persons to discriminate between them. -- Detector l. See under Lock.

A second marriage, after the death of the first husband of wife; -- in distinction from bigamy, as defined in the old canon law. See Bigamy. Goldsmith.

egetables; often with of, by, with, from, and rarely for, before the cause or occasion of death; as, to die of disease or hardships; to die by fire or the sword; to die with horror at the thought. To die by the roadside of grief and hunger. Macaulay. She will die from want of care. Tennyson.

n of poisons, gases, etc., through the body. Unlike absorption, diffusion may go on after death, that is, after the blood ceases to circulate.

Pertaining to a second marriage, that is, one after the death of the first wife or the first husband.

.; into a liquid or a soft substance and removing a part. Whoever dips too deep will find death in the pot. L'Estrange.

ses from an obligation, liability, penalty, etc., as a price of ransom, a legal document. Death, who sets all free, Hath paid his ransom now and full discharge. Milton.

To take or let out the bowels or interior parts of; to eviscerate. Soon after their death, they are disemboweled. Cook. Roaring floods and cataracts that sweep From disemboweled earth the virgin gold. Thomson.

To send out of the world; to put to death. The company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them with their swords. Ezek. xxiii. 47.

ite; to disjoin; as, to dissociate the particles of a concrete substance. Before Wyclif's death in 1384, John of Gaunt had openly dissociated himself from the reformer. A. W. Ward.

y by terminating its sessions; the breaking up of a partnership. Dissolution is the civil death of Parliament. Blackstone.

y or mind; as, to suffer distress from the gout, or from the loss of friends. Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress. Shak.

To make away; to put away. Nothing but death Shall e'er divorce my dignities. Shak.

To put or bring into a form, state, or condition, especially in the phrases, to do death, to put to death; to slay; to do away (often do away with), to put away; to remove; to do on, to put on; to don; to do off, to take off, as dress; to doff; to do into, to put into the form of; to translate or transform into, as a t…

; a member of the medical profession; a physician. By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death Will seize the doctor too. Shak.

An example for instruction or warning. [Obs.] They were forth with stoned to death, as a document to others. Sir W. Raleigh.

Pain; grief; distress; anguish. [Written also dolour.] [Poetic] Of death and dolor telling sad tidings. Spenser.

Ruin; death. This is the day of doom for Bassianus. Shak.