dead-pay

English

Noun

dead-pay (countable and uncountable, plural dead-pays) (military)

1. Pay drawn for soldiers, or others, really dead, whose names are kept on the rolls.
   • c. 1621-1626, Philip Massinger, The Unnatural Combat

     O you commanders, / That, like me, have no dead-pays.

2. A dead soldier whose pay is illicitly claimed by another person.

Related terms

• mortpay

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “dead-pay”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)