Other forms: deaths
Death is the end of a life. His death, cause of death, the death of a friend.
English handles the word carefully: passed away, lost, no longer with us are the gentler forms, and death is the plain one used by doctors, coroners and newspapers. Death certificate, death toll and cause of death are the fixed official phrases. Note put to death; to death as an intensifier — bored to death, worried to death; and a matter of life and death, which is used for almost nothing that is.
1noundeathThe end of a life.~98%
“The cause of death was recorded as heart failure.”
2noundestructionThe destruction or end of something.~2%
“That decision was the death of the whole scheme.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
death is an ending.
Old English deað comes from the same Germanic root as die and dead, with an ending that turns a verb into a noun — the same -th as in growth and length. The whole family has been one word since before English existed.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰew-
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰówtus
Proto-Germanic
*dauþuz
Proto-West Germanic
*dauþu
Old English
dēaþ
Middle English
deth
English, today
death
From Middle English deth, deeth, from Old English dēaþ, from Proto-West Germanic dauþu, from Proto-Germanic dauþuz, from Proto-Indo-European dʰówtus. More at die. 2 Cognate with Scots daeth, daith, death, deeth, deith (“death”), frr Duar, duas, düüs (“death”), stq Dood (“death”), West Frisian dea (“death”), Dutch dood (“death”), German Tod, Todt (“death”), li doead (“death”), lb Doud (“death”), Yiddish טויט (“death”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål død (“death”), Faroese deyði (“death”), Icelandic dauði (“death”), Norwegian Nynorsk daude, død (“death”), Swedish död (“death”), Gothic 𐌳𐌰𐌿𐌸𐌿𐍃 (“death”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA