mortality

1. The state or quality of being mortal.Examples: "[…] actions of Charity do alleviate, as I may say, and take off from the Mortality of the Sin."archaiccountableuncountable

2. The state or quality of being mortal.Examples: "Hold therefore Angelo: / In our remoue, be thou at full, our selfe: / Mortallitie and Mercie in Vienna / Liue in thy tongue, and heart: Old Escalus / Though first in question, is thy secondary. / Take thy Commission."; "1685, Thomas Willis, Tract of Fevers, Chapter 15, in The London Practice of Physick, London: Thomas Basset and William Crooke, p. 626, […] the Fevers of Women in Child-bed; to wit, both the Lacteal, and that called Putrid, which, by reason of its Mortality, deserves to be call’d Malignant."Synonyms: deadliness, lethalityarchaiccountableuncountable

3. The number of deaths; and, usually and especially, the number of deaths per time unit (usually per year), expressed as a rate.Examples: "In foundling hospitals, and among the children brought up by parish charities the mortality is still greater than among those of the common people."; "Some of the objects of enquiry would be […] what was the comparative mortality among the children of the most distressed part of the community, and those who lived rather more at their ease […]"; "And, even in peace and at home, what was the sanitary condition of the Army? The mortality in the barracks was, she found, nearly double the mortality in civil life."Synonyms: death rate, mortality rate, casualty ratecountableuncountable

4. (figuratively) Death.Examples: "Why am I mockt with death, and length’nd out / To deathless pain? how gladly would I meet / Mortalitie my sentence, and be Earth / Insensible,"; "Learn to bear your Husband’s Death like a reasonable Woman. ’Tis not the fashion, now-a-days so much as to affect Sorrow upon these Occasions. No Woman would ever marry, if she had not the Chance of Mortality for a Release."; "[…] like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption."Synonyms: fatality, quietus, death, celestial transfer, decease, decomposition, defunction, dematerializationcountablefigurativelyuncountable

5. (figuratively, archaic) Mortals collectively.Examples: "It is not fit Mortalitie should knowe / What his eternall prouidence decreed,"; "[S]leepe seiz’d his weary eye, / That salues all care, to all mortality."Synonyms: humankind, humanity, mankindarchaiccountablefigurativelyuncountable