The fact of something being lethal; the ability of something to kill.
Used in a Sentence
lethality
Definitions, parts of speech, synonyms, and sentence examples for lethality.
Editorial note
Rate of fire and lethality have limited correlation, but perhaps more interesting for this discussion, legality and lethality have even less.
Examples15
Definitions2
Parts of speech1
Quick take
The fact of something being lethal; the ability of something to kill.
Meaning at a glance
The clearest senses and uses of lethality gathered in one view.
The degree of lethal (mortal) danger that something (usually a disease or a weapon) presents; the magnitude of its power to kill organisms exposed to it; this property is indirectly measured by any of various proxy rates, including mortality rate, case fatality rate, or infection fatality rate (for diseases) or kill rate (for weapons, pesticides, or parasites).
Definitions
Core meanings and parts of speech for lethality.
noun
The fact of something being lethal; the ability of something to kill.
noun
The degree of lethal (mortal) danger that something (usually a disease or a weapon) presents; the magnitude of its power to kill organisms exposed to it; this property is indirectly measured by any of various proxy rates, including mortality rate, case fatality rate, or infection fatality rate (for diseases) or kill rate (for weapons, pesticides, or parasites).
Example sentences
Rate of fire and lethality have limited correlation, but perhaps more interesting for this discussion, legality and lethality have even less.
Military weapons are designed for maximum lethality, police weapons are designed for minimum lethality.
> Military weapons are designed for maximum lethality, police weapons are designed for minimum lethality.
You could say that they're just another increase in scale from the lethality of World war 2.
It only makes sense that the increasing lethality of computerized weaponry would cause this to happen for armored vehicles.
Which are available with an increasing level, based on lethality, of vetting before you can legally obtain said weapon.
Military weapons are designed (or at least, selected) for cost-effective lethality -- even the heavy-spending US weighs logistical concerns heavily.
At the current estimate of 70% lethality, there's your 1M million people 10-16 days after infection.
That's an interesting point on the actual lethality of the disease under more modern treatment conditions.
This limited the spread and the overall lethality of any diseases on the Europeans.
For the scenarios most people are concerned about, semi-automatic handguns are of the same relative lethality as an AR-15 (in rifle configuration).
Since the 5.56 FMJ round's lethality is tied to fragmentation more than punching big holes, this could fix many of the failure-to-stop issues 2.
Quote examples
The argument here is that lethality makes HIV "less fit" from an evolutionary standpoint, which makes sense, as, given the means of transmission, killing the host isn't a particularly useful thing for the virus to do.
What few are aware of is that it's not the air temperature ("dry bulb") but the wet-bulb temperature that represents lethality, with 30 °C being acutely dangerous and 35 °C being fatal (the hottest days in the hottest deserts, even with dry-bulb temperatures in the 50s, typically have wet-bulb temperatures in the unpleasant but bearable 20s).
Proper noun examples
Lethality is irrelevant to a virus, all that matters is the probability of transmission.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers drawn from the clearest meanings and examples for this word.
How do you use lethality in a sentence?
Rate of fire and lethality have limited correlation, but perhaps more interesting for this discussion, legality and lethality have even less.
What does lethality mean?
The fact of something being lethal; the ability of something to kill.
What part of speech is lethality?
lethality is commonly used as noun.