underlife

English

Etymology

From under- +‎ life.

Noun

underlife (plural underlives)

  1. Life concealed from common knowledge.
    • 1917, J. D. Beresford, Kenneth Richmond, chapter 5, in W. E. Ford: A Biography‎, New York: George H. Doran, pages 94–95:
      And I have gathered that Ford talked to Mary Worthington, not in so frank a strain but to the same more generalised effect, about that perpetual bother of sex which so afflicts the unacknowledged underlives of civilised people.
    • 1951, John Cowper Powys, Porius (published 2007),
      It pushed him on to search into, to try to understand, to seek to share the power of this extraordinary being, the extent of whose underlife was so much larger than his own.
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