How deadline got its name

My last column was entitled “Write your own obituary,” and as I ended the article, I stated that I would write my own obituary in 2026, with my “dead” line being Dec. 31, 2026. 

It was a bit of a joke, but it made me think about the word “deadline,” and I wondered just how that word came to be. Deadline seems like a funny word for what it means, which is a date or time when something must be finished. Why is the word “dead” used? 

In the newspaper business, we use the word deadline to describe a day when we publish the newspaper. We tell folks, “We are on deadline,” to let them know we are super busy that day, and cannot do other things that take us away from the tasks at hand.