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say it: LAHY-flahyn
lifeline is a noun meaning "a crease on the palm; its length is said by palmists to indicate how long you will live". It is pronounced /ˈlaɪˌflaɪn/ — LAHY-flahyn. It carries 4 recorded senses.
a crease on the palm; its length is said by palmists to indicate how long you will live
support that enables people to survive or to continue doing something (often by providing an essential connection)
“the airlift provided a lifeline for Berlin”
“she offered me a lifeline in my time of grief”
line that raises or lowers a deep-sea diver
line thrown from a vessel that people can cling to in order to save themselves from drowning
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for lifeline come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.