A word is dead
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
first printed 1894 (in a letter); this text 1896

Cold Library · Open Stacks · S-004017 · https://coldlibrary.com/s/004017
Rights: First printed in 1894 in Letters of Emily Dickinson, then as a poem in Poems, Third Series (1896); the author died in 1886 and the editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, in 1932. Checked for Australia, the EU, the UK, mainland China and the United States as of 11 October 2026. Guidance, not legal advice.
Source: Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12242/pg12242.txt (retrieved 2026-10-11)
Generated 2026-10-14 from https://coldlibrary.com/en/open-stacks/dickinson-a-word-is-dead

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A word is dead
When it is said,
  Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
  That day.