different between mortality vs null

English

Etymology

From Old French mortalite, from Latin mort?lit?s, from mort?lis (“relating to death”), from mors (“death”); equivalent to mortal +? -ity.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /m???tæl?ti/

Noun

mortality (countable and uncountable, plural mortalities)

1. The state or quality of being mortal.
   1. The state of being susceptible to death.

      Antonym: immortality

      • 1595, Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 13 in Amoretti and Epithalamion, London: William Ponsonby,^[1]

        […] her minde remembreth her mortalitie,

        what so is fayrest shall to earth returne.

      • 1609, William Shakespeare, Sonnet 65,^[2]

        Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

        But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,

        How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

        Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

      • 1714, Alexander Pope, letter to John Gay in Letters of Mr. Pope, and Several Eminent Persons, London, 1735, Volume 2, p. 208,^[3]

        I have been perpetually troubled with sickness of late, which has made me so melancholy that the Immortality of the Soul has been my constant Speculation, as the Mortality of my Body my constant Plague.

      • 1829, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Timbuctoo” in A Complete Collection of the English Poems Which Have Obtained the Chancellor’s Gold Medal in the University of Cambridge, Cambridge: Macmillan, 1859, p. 156,^[4]

        “ […] Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality;

        They spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay:

        Open thine eyes and see.”

      • 1969, Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, New York: Random House, Chapter 2, p. 157,^[5]

        But on that onerous day [of the funeral], oppressed beyond relief, my own mortality was borne in upon me on sluggish tides of doom.

   2. (archaic) The quality of being punishable by death.
      • 1681, John Dryden, The Spanish Fryar, London: Richard Tonson and Jacob Tonson, Act II, p. 28,^[6]

        […] actions of Charity do alleviate, as I may say, and take off from the Mortality of the Sin.

   3. (archaic) The quality of causing death.

      Synonyms: deadliness, lethality

      • 1685, Thomas Willis, Tract of Fevers, Chapter 15, in The London Practice of Physick, London: Thomas Basset and William Crooke, p. 626,^[7]

        […] 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.

2. The number of deaths.
   1. Deaths resulting from an event (such as a war, epidemic or disaster).

      Synonym: casualty rate

      • 1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, London: E. Nutt et al., p. 200,^[8]

        […] the Mortality was so great in the Yard or Alley, that there was no Body left to give Notice to the Buriers or Sextons, that there were any dead Bodies there to be bury’d.

      • 1853, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, London: Chapman and Hall, Volume 3, Chapter 9, p. 242,^[9]

        […] the doctors stood aghast at the swift mortality among the untended sufferers […]

      • 1928, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Penguin, 1942, Chapter 1, p. 23,^[10]

        The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid air and fell like stones to the ground. […] The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous.

   2. (biology, ecology, demography, insurance) The number of deaths per given unit of population over a given period of time.

      Synonyms: death rate, mortality rate

      • 1776, Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, Volume 1, Book 1, Chapter 8, p. 97,^[11]

        In foundling hospitals, and among the children brought up by parish charities the mortality is still greater than among those of the common people.

      • 1798, Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, London: J. Johnson, Chapter 2, pp. 32-33,^[12]

        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 […]

      • 1918, Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, London: Chatto and Windus, “Florence Nightingale,” Chapter 3, p. 146,^[13]

        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.

      • 1962, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Chapter 8, p. 114,^[14]

        […] a drought year brought conditions especially favorable to the beetle and the mortality of elms went up 1000 per cent.

3. (figuratively) Death.
   • 1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 9, lines 774-777,^[15]

     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,

   • 1728, John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, Dublin: George Risk et al., Act II, Scene 11, p. 37,^[16]

     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.

   • 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, Chapter 10, p. 154,^[17]

     […] 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.

   • 1961, Joseph Heller, Catch-22, New York: Dell, 1962, Chapter 10, p. 112,^[18]

     […] the moldy odor of mortality hung wet in the air with the sulphurous fog […]

4. (figuratively, archaic) Mortals collectively.

   Synonyms: humankind, humanity, mankind

   • 1604, Michael Drayton, Moyses in a Map of His Miracles, London, Book 1, pp. 8-9,^[19]

     It is not fit Mortalitie should knowe

     What his eternall prouidence decreed,

   • c. 1615, George Chapman (translator), Homer’s Odysses, London: Nathaniel Butter, Book 23, p. 359,^[20]

     […] sleepe seiz’d his weary eye,

     That salues all care, to all mortality.

Derived terms

Related terms

• mortal

Translations

English

Alternative forms

• Ø (linguistics, abbreviation)
• ? (mathematics, abbreviation)

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French nul, from Latin n?llus.

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /n?l/
• Rhymes: -?l

Noun

null (plural nulls)

1. A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
2. Zero quantity of expressions; nothing.
3. Something that has no force or meaning.
4. (computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (?), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
5. (computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.

   Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null.

6. One of the beads in nulled work.
7. (statistics) Null hypothesis.

Translations

Adjective

null (comparative more null, superlative most null)

1. Having no validity; "null and void"
2. Insignificant.
   • 1924, Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove:

     In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.

3. Absent or non-existent.
4. (mathematics) Of the null set.
5. (mathematics) Of or comprising a value of precisely zero.
6. (genetics, of a mutation) Causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.

Antonyms

• antinull
• non-null

Derived terms

• null determiner
• nullary
• nullity

Verb

null (third-person singular simple present nulls, present participle nulling, simple past and past participle nulled)

1. (transitive, archaic) To nullify; to annul.
2. To form nulls, or into nulls, as in a lathe.
3. (computing, slang, transitive) To crack; to remove restrictions or limitations in (software).

Related terms

• annul
• nulled work

See also

• nil

Cimbrian

Etymology

From Latin n?llus (“none”).

Numeral

null

1. (Luserna) zero

References

• “null” in Patuzzi, Umberto, ed., (2013) Ünsarne Börtar [Our Words], Luserna, Italy: Comitato unitario delle isole linguistiche storiche germaniche in Italia / Einheitskomitee der historischen deutschen Sprachinseln in Italien

Estonian

Numeral

null

1. zero

Faroese

Etymology

From Latin nullus.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /n?l?/
• Rhymes: -?l?

Numeral

null

1. zero

Noun

null n (genitive singular nuls, plural null)

1. (mathematics) the numeric symbol that represents the cardinal number zero

Declension

German

Etymology

From the noun Null (“the number zero”), from Italian nulla, from Latin nulla, feminine singular of nullus (“no, none”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /n?l/

Numeral

null

1. zero; nil; nought; (tennis) love (integer number between -1 and 1, denoting no quantity at all)

2. (colloquial) zero; no

   Synonym: (überhaupt) kein

Coordinate terms

Adjective

null (not comparable)

1. (specialist, law, chiefly predicative) null (having no validity)

Declension

Derived terms

• null und nichtig (also in common use)

Further reading

• “null” in Duden online and “null” in Duden online; cp. “null” in Duden online and “null” in Duden online
• “null” in Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache; cp. “Null” in Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache

Hunsrik

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /nul/

Numeral

null

1. zero

Further reading

• Online Hunsrik Dictionary

Norwegian Bokmål

Etymology

From Latin nullus (“no one, none, no”), from Proto-Italic *ne oinolos, from Proto-Italic *oinos (“one”), from Proto-Indo-European *óynos (“one, single”).

Determiner

null

1. no (determiner: not any)

   ha null penger - to have no money

Numeral

null

1. zero, nought, nil

Noun

null m (definite singular nullen, indefinite plural nuller, definite plural nullene)
null n (definite singular nullet, indefinite plural null or nuller, definite plural nulla or nullene)

1. zero (numeric symbol of zero), nought, nil
2. a nobody or nonentity (derogatory about a person)

Derived terms

• nullstille
• nulltoleranse
• nullvekst

References

• “null” in The Bokmål Dictionary.

Norwegian Nynorsk

Etymology

From Latin nullus

Determiner

null

1. no (determiner: not any)

   ha null pengar - to have no money

Numeral

null

1. zero, nought, nil

Noun

null m (definite singular nullen, indefinite plural nullar, definite plural nullane)
null n (definite singular nullet, indefinite plural null, definite plural nulla)

1. zero (numeric symbol of zero), nought, nil
2. a nobody or nonentity (derogatory about a person)

Derived terms

• nulltoleranse
• nullvekst

References

• “null” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.

Pennsylvania German

Etymology

Compare German null.

Numeral

null

1. zero