I need a word to fill the blank in this sentence: "The hurricane was one of the most blank-deadly events in history."
The human death count was recorded, but not the death count not for other species, so it was definitely a deadly event for humans, but the toll taken on other species was not known.
At the moment I'm using human for this purpose, but human-deadly doesn't sound quite right, nor as good as possible.
I understand that without the word, the statement would generally be taken as referring to humans but I would prefer to specify.
Best Answer
Deadly is generally taken to refer to humans, and so does not need a qualifier. In fact, I can't actually think of a word that would be comfortably and effectively used in the way you want to use it.
Also, we usually say "deadliest" instead of "most deadly."
It is understood that we are talking about people in such cases, unless we specify something else. Therefore, if you want to indicate it killed a lot of alligators, you would say something like, "For the alligator population, it was one of the deadliest events...."
If you still feel the need to emphasize that you're talking about human beings, I would suggest you say "in human history" rather than simply "in history."
Addendum to address the new final sentence of your edited question:
I really can't come up with a word that works for your purpose. If you want to specify that you are just talking about how many people died, I suggest you restructure the sentence. Here are a few possibilities:
And there are many more.