dead-pay

dead-pay (countable and uncountable, plural dead-pays) (military)

1. Pay drawn for soldiers, or others, really dead, whose names are kept on the payroll.
   • c. 1621-1626, Philip Massinger, The Unnatural Combat

     O you commanders, / That, like me, have no dead-pays.

2. A dead soldier whose pay is illicitly claimed by another person.

• mortpay

• “dead-pay”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.