life sentence

1. 1.

   a prison term lasting as long as the prisoner lives

   “he got life for killing the guard”

   Synonymslife

   Broaderprison term

Questions about life sentence

What does life sentence mean?

life sentence means "a prison term lasting as long as the prisoner lives".

What is another word for life sentence?

Close synonyms include life. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is life sentence a common word?

life sentence is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.