in extremis

Latin.

in extremity.

near death.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
Cite This Source

Collins

World English Dictionary

in extremis (ɪn ɪkˈstriːmɪs)

—*adv*
1.	in extremity; in dire straits
2.	at the point of death

[literally: in the furthest reaches]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

00:10

In_extremis is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

American Heritage

Medical Dictionary

in extremis in ex·tre·mis (ĭn ěk-strē'mĭs)
adv.
At the point of death.

Matching Quote

"Two destitute lives. Two sickly bachelors, chaste though without vows, deprived of all daily affection, suffering all the torments of poetic passion, but for the Idea—adventurers of the mind only. Two existences virtually devoid of external vicissitudes. For one, the breaking-off of an engagement, the final attack against the Church, and death at forty-two. For the other, still less: a few years' professorship, a long wandering solitude, madness at forty-four. Each produced in some fifteen years his difficult, seminal work, and attracted only in extremis, by scandal, the attention of a few contemporaries. This external nakedness, contrasting with so much inner pathos, renders these lives exemplary; two pure tensions. In them the action of the mythic powers perfectly reveals its slow movements of approach, of alternating emergence and eclipse. These two chaste men meditated much on love, on women, and on marriage. Nietzsche has certainly written less on these subjects than Kierkegaard, but his work is no less rich in brief, often brazenly contradictory judgments on these three themes. It is remarkable that Nietzsche's contradictions afford a faithful epitome of Kierkegaard's, which in their turn repeat those of St. Paul himself."

-Denis De Rougemont

Remove ads like these. Upgrade now!