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maim

UK/meɪm/US/meɪm/
verbB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,051 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: maimed, maiming, maims

To maim is to wound somebody so badly they are permanently damaged. Maimed for life, killed or maimed, maim the survivors.

Permanence is the whole word — a maiming is an injury that does not heal — which is why it appears in casualty reporting alongside killed. Landmines maim more often than they kill, and that is by design. Note mayhem, which is the same word arriving through law French, where it named exactly this offence.

Definitions of maim

  1. 1verbmaimTo wound somebody so badly they are permanently damaged.B2+

    “The explosion killed two workers and maimed several others.”

maim is a permanent wounding.

Where it comes from

Anglo-Norman mahaigner is of uncertain Germanic origin. Mayhem is the same word arriving through legal French.

  1. Anglo-Norman

    maheimer

  2. Middle English

    maymen

  3. English, today

    maim

From Middle English maymen, mahaymen, from Anglo-Norman maheimer, mahaigner, of gem origin; see mayhem.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

maim in the wild

  • In the game, the player takes on the role of an unseen torturer who must maim, mutilate, and murder restrained non-player characters in a variety of dungeon settings.

    Chiller (video game)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.