dead-pan

comparative more dead-pan · superlative most dead-pan

1. alternativeAlternative form of deadpan.

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

   2000, Nelson Williams, Jr., Blood Double, page 96

   2 more examples

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

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

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

   2015, Mark Ravenhill, Citizenship, page 5

comparative more dead-pan · superlative most dead-pan

1. alternativeAlternative form of deadpan.

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

   2015, Robin Stevens, Arsenic For Tea

   2 more examples

   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.

   2007, Frederik Pohl, Platinum Pohl

   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.

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

plural dead-pans

1. alternativeAlternative form of deadpan.

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

   1936, Edmund Wilson, Travels in Two Democracies, page 51

   2 more examples

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

   1940, Louis Adamic, From Many Lands, page 224

   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.

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

present singular third person dead-pans · participle present dead-panning · participle past dead-panned · past dead-panned

1. alternativeAlternative form of deadpan.

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

   2012, Jackie Collins, American Star

   2 more examples

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

   1983, Rod McQueen, The Money-spinners

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

   1999, Gabriel Brahm, The Post-human Condition