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Mortal

Disease
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

“Mortal” means subject to death or, in relation to illness, fatal. It can stress the shared human condition of bodily limits and inevitable mortality.

Detailed Definition
“Mortal” is not the name of a disease, but it frequently appears beside illness, wounds, plague, and decline to mark a life as vulnerable to death. A mortal sickness is one that can kill, while a mortal body is one that cannot escape time, injury, or decay. In poetry, the word gives medical suffering philosophical weight by linking an individual fever or wound to universal human finitude. It may also contrast fragile mortal life with immortal gods, enduring nature, memory, art, or spiritual hope.
Example
Example in poetry:
Mortal coil shuffled off in peaceful sleep (William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"); A mortal wound no earthly medicine could heal (John Milton, "Paradise Lost"); Mortal shadows falling across the sundial's face (Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam"); Mortal man standing before the eternal sea (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"); Mortal beauty fading like the morning dew (John Keats, "Ode on Melancholy")
Additional Notes
Derived from the Latin mortalis ("subject to death"), "mortal" defines the essential boundary of human existence. In poetry, mortality is perhaps the ultimate universal theme—central to elegies, sonnets, and memento mori verse. Poets contrast human mortal fragility with the immortal realms of nature, art, or divinity (such as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 or Keats’s "Ode to a Nightingale"). Instructors can prompt students to trace how "mortal" shifts in meaning from literal bodily death to tragic emotional vulnerability and temporal transience. Related terms include ephemeral, transient, memento mori, and perishable.
Other Meanings of “Mortal”
Also Known As
Death-Bound Perishable Fatal
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