Englishdead as a doornail
Meaning: Completely dead, or completely finished, with no chance of revival.
Example: “After the factory closed, the town's main street was dead as a doornail.”
Origin: One of the oldest similes in English: it appears in poetry of the 1350s, including William Langland's Piers Plowman, and Shakespeare used it in Henry VI, Part 2. Charles Dickens made it famous at the start of A Christmas Carol (1843), where Marley is "as dead as a door-nail" and the narrator wonders aloud what makes a doornail especially dead. Doornails were the large-headed nails studding old doors. The popular explanation is that they were driven through and bent flat on the far side, so they could never be pulled out or reused, but no source confirms it.
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