Meaning of death in English

death

noun [ C or U ]

/deθ/ us

/deθ/

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the end of life:

The disease causes thousands of deaths a year.

Do you believe in life after death?

He never got over the death of his daughter.

death threats

bored, frightened, etc. to death

extremely bored, frightened, etc.:

She's frightened to death of snakes.

to death

until you die:

The animals burned to death in the barn.

the death of someone/something

the cause of the end of life, or the end or destruction of something:

The failure of the family business was the death of him.

More examplesFewer examples

She reacted surprisingly calmly to the news of his death.
Following her son's death, she became quiet and withdrawn and rarely went out.
He was jailed for 15 years for stabbing his wife to death.
He gave a slight shudder as he considered how near he had come to death.
The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Death and dying

bereave
bite
bleed out
buy the farm idiom
cadaveric
death toll
depart this life idiom
fatality
ghost
macabre
push
remains
snuff
starvation
strike someone down
suffocation
terminally
those whom the gods love die young idiom
toll
watery

See more results »

Idioms

be at death's door
be in at the death
catch your death of cold
look/feel like death warmed up

(Definition of death from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

death | American Dictionary

death

noun [ C/U ]

/deθ/

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the end of life:

[ C ] a sudden/natural death

[ U ] I hope she finds the peace in death she never found in life.

[ U ] Fire ants stung a woman to death (= caused her to die).

Idiom

to death

(Definition of death from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of death

death

On average, comfort care plans were put in place 9 days prior to death.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

After death, family members reported the actual family involvement in health care decisions near death.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The straightforward thing to say, in both cases, is that removing the life support caused the patient's death.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

My death is the event that is supposed to make us morally concerned in the first place.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

His reputation suffered after his death (his style did not develop during the last few decades of his life) and has still not been rehabilitated.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The parents were transferred to new bean plants to avoid overcrowding and early death of plants and aphids.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The accumulation of polymers within the secretory pathway leads to hepatocyte death and, ultimately, to liver cirrhosis.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Characteristics of effective home-visiting programs include multidimensional assessment, many follow-up visits, and targeting people at lower risk of death.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Moreover, the death rate was only high amongst the older age groups.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

For example, during a 500-year period, a population of around 5,000 people will 'produce' perhaps some 70,000 deaths.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Work on the project paid poorly and involved high risks : permanent disability and death were a constant specter.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The manner of a person's death will often lead to a reconsideration of a life - who and what they were.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Of the eight deaths observed on study, six were in the placebo group and two were in the creatine group.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations with death

death

These are words often used in combination with death.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

angel of death

I hope the door will remain ajar until it closes with the angel of death and the monster of aggression outside the threshold for ever.

From the

Hansard archive

Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0

cardiac death

This rare type of coronary anomaly has been regarded as having little clinical significance, but it can lead to sudden cardiac death under physical exertion.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

cause death

These other chromosomal anomalies occur less frequently and often cause death in infancy.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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What is the pronunciation of death?