Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Dead
Dead as Chelsea.
—Anonymous
Dead as a man after two doctors have visited him.
—Anonymous
Dead as leaves on a painted canvas.
—Anonymous
Dead as mackerel.
—Anonymous
Dead as the nail in a coffin.
—Anonymous
Dead as the Roman Empire.
—Anonymous
Dead as the wholesale district on Sunday.
—Anonymous
Dead as Aristophanes.
—William Archer
My sweetest child,
Which like a flow’r crush’d with a blast, is dead.
—Sir John Beaumont
Dead as a buried vestal whose whole strength
Goes when the grate above shuts heavily.
—Robert Browning
As dead to the life I once lived as if the Styx rolled between it and me.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
As dead to you as the dust of your fathers.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Dead as a herring.
—Samuel Butler
Dede as stoon.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
Dead as Scrooge’s partner.
—Henry A. Clapp
Dead as Julius Cæsar.
—Joseph Conrad
Dead as Pharaoh.
—Charles Dickens
Dead as a salmon in a fishmonger’s basket.
—George Farquhar
Dead as charity.
—Nathaniel Field
Dead as a perished delight.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland
Dead as the bulrushes round little Moses,
On the old banks of the Nile.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Dead to sounds, as a ship out of soundings.
—Thomas Hood
Dead as bricks.
—Thomas Hood
More dead than Morpheus’ imaginings.
—John Keats
Ded as a dore-nayle.
—William Langland
Ded as dore-tree.
—William Langland
Lies dead,
As a corse on the sea-shore, whose spirit has fled.
—Henry W. Longfellow
Dead as last year’s clothes in a fashionable fine lady’s wardrobe.
—George Meredith
The Dead are like the stars by day;
Withdrawn from mortal eye,
But not extinct, they hold their way
In glory through the sky.
—James Montgomery
Dead as wood.
—Lewis Morris
Dead as desire in the dead.
—Sydney Munden
Dead as mutton.
—Charles Reade
Dead as a dog that lieth in a ditch.
—Samuel Rowlands
Dead as earth.
—William Shakespeare
Death lies on her, like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.
—William Shakespeare
Dead as night when stars wax dim.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Dead as dreams of days that were
Before the new-born world lay bare
In heaven’s wide eye.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Dead as the carver’s figured throng.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Dead as the dawn’s grey dew
At high midnoon of the mounting day that mocks the might of the dawn it slew.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
Dead as yesterday.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
As dead and sapless as last month’s leaves.
—Sir Henry Taylor
Dead as dreams.
—William Watson
Dead as smelts.
—Daniel Webster
Dead as the ropes of roses on St. James street.
—Israel Zangwill