fatality

plural fatalities

1. The state proceeding from destiny; invincible necessity, superior to, and independent of, free and rational control.

   Synonyms: inevitability, banker, cert, certainty, certitude, cinch, dead cert, inevitability

2. Tendency to death, destruction or danger, as if by decree of fate.

   Synonyms: mortality

3. That which is decreed by fate or which is fatal; a fatal event.

   Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising the memory of Anne Catherick, and setting her between us like a fatality that it was hopeless to avoid?

   1860, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

   Synonyms: destiny, doom, chance, destin, destiny, doom, fate, foredoom

4. Death.

   Synonyms: demise, the big sleep, death, end, tomb, celestial transfer, decease, decomposition

5. An accident that causes death.

   the whole thing felt like being in a near traffic fatality avoided by inches and later not being able to think of the whole thing lest you begin shaking...

   2011, David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, page 13

6. A person killed.
7. video gamesA move used to deliver a coup de grâce to a defeated opponent.

   My first enchantment with computers came when I was about six years old, in Montreal in the early nineties, playing Mortal Kombat with my oldest brother. He told me about some “fatalities”—gruesome, witty ways of killing your opponent.

   2023 November 13, James Somers, “A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN