dead-pan

English

Adjective

dead-pan (comparative more dead-pan, superlative most dead-pan)

1. Alternative form of deadpan
   • 2000, Nelson Williams, Jr., Blood Double, page 96:

     He stared for a few seconds, then asked with a dead-pan expression, “And some chiange?”

   • 2004, Donna Robie, One Quiet Night: Murder in New Hampshire, page 30:

     Jimbo had seen many drifters in all his years, and they all had that dead-pan look in their eyes.

   • 2015, Mark Ravenhill, Citizenship, page 5:

     It might be better to see the title almost as comic, in its dead-pan announcement of an Important Political Issue.

Adverb

dead-pan (comparative more dead-pan, superlative most dead-pan)

1. Alternative form of deadpan
   • 2007, Frederik Pohl, Platinum Pohl:

     There was his left-hand head talking and sort of yapping that silly laugh of his, dead-pan, while the right-hand head was all creased up with giggle lines.

   • 2012, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Night and Silence, Who is Here?:

     Dead-pan, he took down Matthew's broken explanations, shook his hand warmly, refused a drink and a plaster for his leg, and ran for the first public call-box as hard as he could go.

   • 2015, Robin Stevens, Arsenic For Tea:

     "Why would you think that?" asked Daisy, dead-pan.

Noun

dead-pan (plural dead-pans)

1. Alternative form of deadpan
   • 1936, Edmund Wilson, Travels in Two Democracies, page 51:

     They are the eerie half-human attendants at anything that is new on Broadway — the dead-pans of the Theatre Guild openings.

   • 1940, Louis Adamic, From Many Lands, page 224:

     The older people have “Japanesey” dead-pans, whereas many of the American generation can display a great variety of emotions facially.

   • 1971, Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, page 58:

     Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO.

Verb

dead-pan (third-person singular simple present dead-pans, present participle dead-panning, simple past and past participle dead-panned)

1. Alternative form of deadpan
   • 1983, Rod McQueen, The Money-spinners:

     "I've long admired men who have risen from humble beginnings," Mulholland says, and then dead-pans: "Dr. Laffer was educated at Yale."

   • 1999, Gabriel Brahm, The Post-human Condition:

     Thus, "I know where I am," Bartleby dead-pans, when offered better food during his final incarceration.

   • 2012, Jackie Collins, American Star:

     'I don't have a black tie,' she dead-panned. He didn't laugh.

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