Other forms: deadlines
A deadline is the moment your work has to be finished — not a suggestion, a line. Five o'clock on Friday for the report, midnight for the tax return, the last day the form can be posted.
You meet a deadline, miss one, set one, extend one, or work to one, and the ones that hurt are tight deadlines. It is a single word, and it takes a plain is: the deadline is Thursday. Newspapers gave the word its charge — reporters filing on deadline, minutes before the presses roll — and offices borrowed it from them. In ordinary use there is nothing deathly about it; the word today is pure calendar.
1noundeadlineThe time or date by which something must be finished.
“We missed the deadline by two hours.”
synonyms: cut-off, time limit
deadline is a time limit.
The first deadlines were lines that did not move: a fishing line held still, and then, in American prisons, a boundary a prisoner was forbidden to cross. In Civil War prison camps that line — cross it and you were shot — carried the name, and there is indirect evidence tying it to the modern sense of a due date. By 1904 a United States government report was using deadline for a minimum work target: a typographer's line was 18,000 ems a day.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, early usage refers to lines that do not move, such as one used in angling. Slightly later American usage refers to a boundary in a prison which prisoners must not cross. There is only indirect evidence that the sense of "due date" may be connected with this use of the term in prison camps during the American Civil War, when it referred to a physical line or boundary beyond which prisoners were shot. In 1904, in a report from the US Department of Commerce and Labor, the term is used for "minimum work goals" (and in contrast to bonus line): for example, as a typographer the line could be 18,000 ems per day; should one not cross this line, then that could have negative consequences. In 1917, the term is attested as a printing term for a guideline on the bed of a printing press beyond which text will not print. Three years later, the term is found in print in the sense of "time limit" in the closely connected publishing industry, indicating the time after which material would not make it into a newspaper or periodical.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA