Other forms: killed, killing, kills
To kill is to make a person, animal or plant die. A fox kills a chicken, frost kills the tomatoes, a crash on the motorway kills two people.
English keeps kill blunt, which is why softer words exist for the moments that need them: people pass away, sick animals are put down, and murder is killing on purpose and against the law. Beyond death, kill means stop something dead — kill the engine, kill the lights, kill a story before it prints, painkillers kill the pain. It is also the everyday exaggeration: my feet are killing me, my dad will kill me, we were killing ourselves laughing. As a noun the kill is the moment the hunted animal dies — moving in for the kill — and the phrases to know are kill time, dressed to kill, and kill two birds with one stone.
1verbplantTo make a person, animal or plant die.~87%
“The frost killed every plant in the greenhouse.”
2verbkillTo stop or end something.~9%
“Kill the engine before you open the bonnet.”
3verbcauseTo cause someone a lot of pain.~2%
“These new shoes are killing me.”
4nounactThe act of killing a hunted animal, or the animal itself.~2%
“The lions dragged the kill into the shade.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Kill is a rare thing: a very common English word whose origin nobody has pinned down. It shows up in Middle English as killen or cullen, meaning to strike, beat or cut, and the trail goes cold there — Scots kele and keil are about the only company it keeps. Note that the oldest recorded sense is the blow, not the death. The killing was what the hitting led to.
Middle English
killen
English, today
kill
Built from
From Middle English killen, kyllen, cullen (“to strike, beat, cut”), of obscure origin. Cognate with Scots kele, keil (“to kill”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA