Transitively; to cause one to fail in reciting.  Said of a teacher who puzzles a scholar with difficult questions, and thereby causes him to fail.

  Have I been screwed, yea, deaded morn and eve,
  Some dozen moons of this collegiate life,
  And not yet taught me to philosophize?
    Harvardiana, Vol.  III. p. 255.

DEAD.  A complete failure; a declaration that one is not prepared to recite.

One must stand up in the singleness of his ignorance to understand all the mysterious feelings connected with a dead.—­Harv.  Reg., p. 378.

  And fearful of the morrow’s screw or dead,
  Takes book and candle underneath his bed.
    Class Poem, by B.D.  Winslow, at Harv.  Coll., 1835, p. 10.

  He, unmoved by Freshman’s curses,
  Loves the deads which Freshmen make.—­MS. Poem.

  But oh! what aching heads had they! 
  What deads they perpetrated the succeeding day.—­Ibid.

It was formerly customary in many colleges, and is now in a few, to talk about “taking a dead.”

  I have a most instinctive dread
  Of getting up to take a dead,
    Unworthy degradation!—­Harv.  Reg., p. 312.

DEAD-SET.  The same as a DEAD, which see.

  Now’s the day and now’s the hour;
  See approach Old Sikes’s power;
  See the front of Logic lower;
    Screws, dead-sets, and fines.—­Rebelliad, p. 52.

Grose has this word in his Slang Dictionary, and defines it “a concerted scheme to defraud a person by gaming.”  “This phrase,” says Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, “seems to be taken from the lifeless attitude of a pointer in marking his game.”

“The lifeless attitude” seems to be the only point of resemblance between the above definitions, and the appearance of one who is taking a dead set.  The word has of late years been displaced by the more general use of the word dead, with the same meaning.

The phrase to be at a dead-set, implying a fixed state or condition which precludes further progress, is in general use.

DEAN.  An officer in each college of the universities in England, whose duties consist in the due preservation of the college discipline.

“Old Holingshed,” says the Gradus ad Cantabrigiam, “in his Chronicles, describing Cambridge, speaks of ’certain censors, or deanes, appointed to looke to the behaviour and manner of the Students there, whom they punish very severely, if they make any default, according to the quantitye and qualitye of their trespasses.’  When flagellation was enforced at the universities, the Deans were the ministers of vengeance.”