lose one's life
English
Verb
lose one's life (third-person singular simple present loses one's life, present participle losing one's life, simple past and past participle lost one's life)
- (euphemistic) To die, especially to be killed during involvement in an activity or in some other undertaking.
- 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], OCLC 995220039, part I (A Voyage to Lilliput):
- The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life.
- 1818, [Mary Shelley], Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] [Macdonald and Son] for Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, OCLC 830979744:
- I have no ambition to lose my life on the post-road between St. Petersburgh and Archangel.
- 1893, William Butler Yeats, "The Friends of the People of Faery" in The Celtic Twilight:
- “[H]is own wife lost her life with an accident that come to a horse that hadn't room to turn right with a harrow between the bush and the wall.”
- 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 2, in The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, OCLC 1029993343:
- “Do you think, Sir, that you could possibly send me on some mission for the paper? . . . anything that had adventure and danger in it. . . .” “You seem very anxious to lose your life.”
- 2006 Dec. 30, Unmesh Kher, "By the Numbers: The U.S. Death Toll," Time:
- [E]nemy fighters killed 2,320 of the troops who lost their lives in Iraq through December 2.
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Synonyms
- See Thesaurus:die
Translations
to die
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References
- “lose one's life”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
- “lose one's life”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
- “lose-your-life” in the Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- “lose-your-life” (US) / “lose-your-life” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.
- lose one's life at TheFreeDictionary