1. The sublunary or terrestrial world.
1609. Daniel, Civ. Wars, VIII. xxx. The glory of that Mightinesse … That ouer-spreds … This vnder-world.
a. 1616. Beaum. & Fl., Bonduca, III. ii. Loud Fame calls ye, Pitch’d on the topless Apenine, and blows To all the underworld.
1700. Rowe, Amb. Step-Mother, I. i. Thou, like the God thou serv’st, shall shine aloft, And with thy influence rule the under world.
a. 1719. Addison, trans. Virgil’s Fourth Georgic, Wks. 1721, I. 19. When th’ under-world is seiz’d with cold and night.
1822. Shelley, Chas. 1st, II. 140. For a king bears the office of a God To all the under world.
fig. 1694. Atterbury, Serm. (1726), I. 173. Their Way was … to look down with Pity and Contempt upon a poor deluded Under-World.
1795. Wolcot (P. Pindar), Liberty’s last Squeak, III. Wks. 1812, III. 425. Our Lords on high, Who call the under-world of man, An assish, mulish, packhorse clan.
2. The abode of the departed, imagined as being under the earth; the nether world.
1608. Day, Hum. out of Br., I. i. Since proud Anthonio … Is in his iourney towards th’ vnderworld.
1713. C’tess Winchelsea, Misc. Poems, 18. When to the Under-world despis’d he goes, A pamper’d carcase on the Worms bestows.
1858. Birch, Anc. Pottery, I. 365. Few Argive representations, except that of the Danaids in the under-world,… are given on vases.
1871. Tylor, Prim. Cult., I. 311. The western Hades, the underworld of night and death.
b. A region below the surface of the earth; a subterranean or underlying area.
1885. Daily News, 4 Nov. The extent to which the underworld in the Potteries is honeycombed with coal mines.
1886. Winchell, Walks Geol. Field, 56. Shall we venture among the dangers of the oceanic under-world?
3. The Antipodes; also, the part of the earth beyond the horizon.
1847. Tennyson, Princ., IV. 27. Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld.
1868. Kingsley, Christmas Day, 34. New patriarchs of the new-found underworld.
1890. ‘R. Boldrewood,’ Col. Reformer (1891), 154. A shining sail came from the underworld and swept placidly towards the city.
4. A sphere or region lying below the ordinary one. Also fig., a lower, or the lowest, stratum of society, etc.
1859. Miss A. B. Edwards, Hand & Glove, vi. 54. Slowly I sank away, lower and lower, into the under-world of darkness and dreams.
1894. Harper’s Mag., March, 630. The mysterious processes which go on under the influence of the bacteria in this underworld of life.
1899. F. T. Bullen, Way Navy, 25. The begrimed company of toilers … in the underworld of engines and boilers [in a ship].
