This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. Treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws wereĪvailable. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this
On the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique calledĬlinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use itĪgain. Hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over could come from a standard term in carpentry. It’s rung down the curtain and joined theĬhoir invisible. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it wouldīe pushing up the daisies. (“This parrot is no more! It has ceased to be. Of course, utterly and completely dead, whether figuratively (“TheĬongo treaty may now be regarded as being as dead as a doornail,”ġ884) or literally defunct in the Monty Python Dead Parrot sense
“Dead as a doornail” (or, I suppose, “deader than a doornail”) means,
It means utterly and completely dead - either literally or figuratively. The phrase is deader than a doornail (or dead as a doornail).
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