death-watch

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noun

a vigil beside a dying or dead person.

a guard set over a condemned person before execution.

Also called deathwatch beetle. any of several beetles of the family Anobiidae that make a ticking sound as they bore through wood: the sound was once believed to be an omen of death.

Origin:
1660–70; death + watch

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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World English Dictionary

deathwatch (ˈdɛθˌwɒtʃ)

—n
1.	a vigil held beside a dying or dead person
2.	deathwatch beetle See also anobiid a beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, whose woodboring larvae are a serious pest. The adult produces a rapid tapping sound with its head that was once popularly supposed to presage death

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

How To Watch Death Note

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Death-watch is always a great word to know.

So is callithumpian. Does it mean:

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

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Matching Quote

"Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time as nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment."

-Leslie Fiedler

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death-watch

death·watch