make away

make away

See also: makeaway

English

Verb

make away (third-person singular simple present makes away, present participle making away, simple past and past participle made away)

1. (obsolete, intransitive) To depart, leave; to make off.
2. (obsolete, transitive) To destroy.
3. (obsolete, transitive) To kill.
   • 1593, anonymous, The Life and Death of Iacke Straw […], Act III:

     By him that dide for me, I wil not dine,
     Till I haue ſeene thee hangd or made away.

   • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 54573970:

     If a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away.

4. (obsolete, transitive) To get rid of, dispose of.
   • 1740, Samuel Richardson, Pamela, vol.II:

     ‘Will you,’ said he, ‘on your honour, let me see them uncurtailed, and not offer to make them away; no, not a single paper?’

5. (obsolete, reflexive) To kill oneself, commit suicide.
   • 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 40, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], OCLC 946730821:

     the people impatient of so many changes of fortune, tooke such a resolution unto death, that I have heard my father say, he kept accompt of five and twentie chiefe housholders, that in one weeke made them-selves away […].

   • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 54573970:

     , New York Review of Books, 2001, p.263:

     Hostratus the friar took that book which Reuchlin had written against him, under the name of Epist. obscurorum vivorum, so to heart, that for shame and grief he made away himself.

Derived terms

• make away with