Library / English Dictionary

PERISH

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life

Example:

The old guy kicked the bucket at the age of 102

Synonyms:

snuff it; pop off; perish; pass away; pass; kick the bucket; go; give-up the ghost; expire; exit; drop dead; die; decease; croak; conk; choke; cash in one's chips; buy the farm

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Hypernyms (to "perish" is one way to...):

change state; turn (undergo a transformation or a change of position or action)

Verb group:

break; break down; conk out; die; fail; give out; give way; go; go bad (stop operating or functioning)

die (suffer or face the pain of death)

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "perish"):

abort (cease development, die, and be aborted)

asphyxiate; stifle; suffocate (be asphyxiated; die from lack of oxygen)

buy it; pip out (be killed or die)

drown (die from being submerged in water, getting water into the lungs, and asphyxiating)

predecease (die before; die earlier than)

famish; starve (die of food deprivation)

fall (die, as in battle or in a hunt)

succumb; yield (be fatally overwhelmed)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s

Credits

 Context examples: 

So he was led out to the sea, and a gold ring was thrown into it, before his eyes; then the king ordered him to fetch this ring up from the bottom of the sea, and added: If you come up again without it you will be thrown in again and again until you perish amid the waves.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

The research shows that the vertebrate fossil record reported in earlier studies – which has been used as the standard in interpreting Earth's largest known mass extinction – is inaccurate and not sufficient to substantiate the long-held belief that marine species and terrestrial vertebrates perished together.

(Mass extinction of land and sea biodiversity 250 million years ago not simultaneous, National Science Foundation)

And yet I felt happier than I had done since this crushing blow had fallen upon me, for it was good to think that the world should know what we had done, so that at the worst our names should not perish with our bodies, but should go down to posterity associated with the result of our labors.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

White Fang had come straight from the Wild, where the weak perish early and shelter is vouchsafed to none.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Had it been otherwise, I must long ago have perished; but as it was, it is surprising how easily and securely my little and light boat could ride.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

When I appeared on deck the master said, “Here is our captain, and he will not allow you to perish on the open sea.”

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Besides, bethink you of His own words—that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Sure was I of His efficiency to save what He had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Whilst he was sitting there, he thought of his dearest mother, and wished that one of the king’s principal servants would begin to speak of her, and would ask how it was faring with the queen in the tower, and if she were alive still, or had perished.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)