The phrase "a dead of" is not correct and does not form a usable expression in written English.
It seems to be a truncation or misphrasing of "a dead of winter," which refers to the middle of winter when it is particularly cold and bleak.
Example: "During the dead of winter, the temperatures can drop below freezing."
Alternatives: "depths of" or "height of".
Michelle Pfeiffer has a phrase for a film you can't turn down: she calls it "a dead-of-winter script".
"The visit was, in some ways, Baltimore's groundhog," we are told, "a dead-of-winter ritual that held a promise of spring".
While Leutze painted a glowing sky and wide river, Mr. Kunstler's painting is more in keeping with the records that this was a dead-of-night crossing at a section of the river less than 300 yards wide.
Set in a dead-of-night Haiti constructed out of matte paintings and stylized back-lot exteriors, the film centers on a decadent French plantation owner (Robert Frazer) who uses zombie labor to staff his sugar cane mill.
On a dead-of-night flight from Des Moines to New Hampshire, Obama, his blue striped tie loosened, walked cautiously to the back of the plane and chatted with reporters.
Wally Parks, who pioneered the transformation of drag racing from a dead-of-night outlaw adventure into a nationally televised sport with millions in annual prize money, died Friday in Burbank, Calif.
Series two was aired in a dead-of-night time-slot on 5USA over Christmas in 2009, and with no warning – they could not have buried it in a deeper hole.
That's only part of it: there's Céline's slapdash magic act as La Mandragore, Julie's manic song-and-dance debut as La Kamikaze, a dead-of-night library raid with roller-skates and an extraordinary number of cats.
This focused mainly on the cost of a dead-of-night operation in January 2010 to move the shrub and tons of earth from its original spot to an undisclosed location in the Presidio, a federal facility near the Golden Gate Bridge.
WASHINGTON — After a long day of acid, partisan debate, Senate Democrats held ranks early Monday in a dead-of-night procedural vote that proved they had locked in the decisive margin needed to pass a far-reaching overhaul of the nation's health care system.
