Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

succumb

UK/səˈkʌm/US/səˈkʌm/
verbC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,503 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: succumbed, succumbing, succumbs

To succumb is to stop resisting and be overcome. Succumb to temptation, succumbed to injury, finally succumbed.

It always follows resistance, which is what gives the word its shade of defeat rather than choice. Succumbed to is also the polite formula for died of, in obituaries and reports. It takes to. Note that the Latin is sub plus cumbere, to lie down — so succumbing is lying down under something.

Definitions of succumb

  1. 1verbsuccumbTo stop resisting and be overcome.C2

    “After weeks of resisting, he finally succumbed to temptation and bought the car.”

succumb is a yielding.

Remember it

sucCUMB → you let it COME over you

You stop pushing back and let it come over you.

hooks ontocome

Where it comes from

Latin succumbere is sub plus cumbere, to lie down. Incumbent and recumbent come from the same lying.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ḱewb-

  2. Old French

    succomber

  3. English, today

    succumb

Borrowed from Old French succomber. From Old French succomber, from Latin succumbō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sharper Verbs

Practise this word

succumb in the wild

  • Nemesis is a Greek mythological spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris.

    Nemesis (disambiguation)

  • The crew obsess over trivial matters when they explore a black hole in a triple star system and succumb to its radiation.

    Singularity (Star Trek: Enterprise)

  • Although the worst effects of the disease were seen in the 1970s and 1980, even now large numbers of salmon will succumb to the disease after spawning.

    Ulcerative dermal necrosis

  • Introduced as an innocent young couple well liked by their families, the two succumb to their sexual desires, and Dana becomes pregnant.

    Se Quiere, Se Mata

  • Litfin was the first victim to be killed by East German border troops, the first to succumb to gunshot wounds, and the first male victim.

    Günter Litfin

1 / 2

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.