Other forms: buried, burying, buries
To bury something is to put it in the ground and cover it over. A dog burying a bone in the flowerbed, a time capsule under a school playground, a whole village standing at the graveside on a wet Tuesday.
The heaviest use is the dead: you bury a person, and the word carries the funeral with it. Beyond earth, you bury anything you hide or press deep down — she buried her face in her hands, the paper buried the story on page nine, the cat buried itself under the duvet. Snow, paperwork and washing all bury things by covering them completely. The pronunciation is the trap: bury rhymes with berry, not with fury, and the past is buried. Three phrases are worth having: bury the hatchet, to end a quarrel; bury your head in the sand, to refuse to look at a problem; and buried in work, meaning swamped.
1verbburyTo put something into the ground and cover it with earth.
“They buried the box of letters under the apple tree.”
2verbplaceTo place a dead body in a grave.
“He was buried in the churchyard beside his wife.”
3verbhideTo hide something, or push it deep out of sight.
“She buried the receipt at the bottom of her bag.”
4verbcompletelyTo cover something completely.
“The path was buried under a foot of snow.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Old English byrġan came from Proto-Germanic *burgijaną, which meant to keep safe, and behind that the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰergʰ-, to defend or protect. The relatives still show it: German bergen and Danish bjerge mean to rescue something. Burying began as protecting, not as losing.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰergʰ-
Middle English
birien
English, today
bury
From Middle English birien. Middle English birien, berien, from Old English byrġan, from Proto-West Germanic burgijan, from Proto-Germanic burgijaną (“to keep safe”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰergʰ- (“to defend, protect”). Cognate with Icelandic byrgja (“to cover, shut; to hold in”); West Frisian bergje (“to keep”), German bergen (“to save/rescue something”), Danish bjerge (“to save/rescue something or somebody”); also Eastern Lithuanian bir̃ginti (“to save, spare”), Russian бере́чь (“to spare”), os ӕмбӕрзын (“to cover”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA