DANCE OF DEATH • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Dance of death

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/dæns əv dɛθ/ Listen

noun

Dance n.

The leaping, tripping, or measured stepping of one who dances; an amusement, in which the movements of the persons are regulated by art, in figures and in accord with music.

(Mus.) A tune by which dancing is regulated, as the minuet, the waltz, the cotillon, etc. Note: The word dance was used ironically, by the older writers, of many proceedings besides dancing. "Of remedies of love she knew parchance For of that art she couth the olde dance."

Dance of Death (Art), an allegorical representation of the power of death over all, the old, the young, the high, and the low, being led by a dancing skeleton.

Morris dance. See Morris.

To lead one a dance, to cause one to go through a series of movements or experiences as if guided by a partner in a dance not understood.

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Etymology of 'Dance of death'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Dance of death" Quotes from Famous Books

... mystery of death to our hearts with pitiless insistence. Every bullet that finds its mark kills more than the soldier who falls. Ties of love and friendship are shattered hour by hour and day by day, as the guns of war roar out their message of destruction. We are all partners in a gigantic Dance of Death such as Holbein never imagined. To him Death was the wily and insistent enemy of human activity and hope, a spy watching in the doorway for an opportunity to snap the thread of life. We have cajoled and magnified Death until he has outgrown all natural ...

— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... banks, a sound rising from the deck of the vessel, a multitude of little taps, rhythmical, muffled, soft as though a corps of clog-dancers were dancing a lively jig in rubber-soled shoes. It is the dance of death of the hapless mackerel. All about the deck they flap and beat their little lives away. Scales fly in every direction, and the rigging, almost to the ...

— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... out," they cried. "If you go back to them, you will die. If you remain here, you will die. We shall kill you; but first we shall have a dance and you shall dance with us—the dance of death." ...

— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... charms into the fire and chanted loathsome spells and terrible curses on Khama. As a boy he had been taught that these witch-doctors had the power to slay or to smite with foul diseases. He would have been more than human if he had not felt a shiver of nameless dread at this lurid and horrible dance of death. ...

— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... outstretched arm of the tall object near the window;—a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind stirred the hanging folds. In my excited state, I seemed to see something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens. I thought of the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne; and it seemed to me that the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon stretch out his bony ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various