to death
Language: English
Part of speech: prep_phrase
Pronunciation: rhymes: -ɛθ
Senses: examples: text: bleed to death
text: freeze to death
text: beat to death
text: There was doubt and bewilderment about what had actually happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the uncertainty was compounded two days later when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death while in the custody of the Dallas police.
ref: 1971, Lyndon Johnson, “"I feel like I have already been here a year"”, in The Vantage Point, Holt, Reinhart & Winston, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, pages 18–19:
glosses: Until death occurs; so as to cause or result in death.
examples: text: I was bored to death in that meeting.
text: 1. Let us go to the wood, says this pig; 2. What to do there? says that pig; 3. To look for my mother, says this pig; 4. What to do with, her? says that pig; 5. Kiss her to death, says this pig.
ref: 1805, Songs for the Nursery, page 5:
text: “Do you know its two, and the man is to call for us at three with the boat, and the supper is cooked to death.”
ref: 1843, Theodore S. Fay, chapter X, in Hoboken: A Romance of New York, volume 2, New York: Harper & Brothers, page 59:
text: He had run two miles, through the woods, to see the new baby. There were more wild-cats than babies in the woods of Kentucky. Besides, this baby was his cousin. He said that he was "tickled to death" to have a boy cousin.
ref: 1915, Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson, The How and Why Library:
text: Are we to be crucified just to save the faces of our leaders or to bolster up the preposterous that India can be a single nation? Is it with a view to achieve a compromise at all costs, or is it to support the illusion that Hindu nationalism is working in the interests of Muslims as well as Hindus? Irony is flattered to death by a mental muddle of such a nature and on such a scale.
ref: 1933, Choudhary Rahmat Ali et al., Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever?:
text: Now, though, it was six-thirty—high time for them both to be back, whatever the trouble— and a roast cooking to death in the oven.
ref: 1948, Albert E. Idell, The Great Blizzard, New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 174:
text: She giggled furiously, the bosom in violent action. “Ah'm gonna love it to death here.”
ref: 1967, Trudy Baker, Rachel Jones, Donald Bain (uncredited), Coffee, Tea, or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses, New York: Bantam Books, page 9:
text: 1989 December 25, U.S. government Foreign Broadcast Information Service (translator), Transcript of the closed trial of Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu (translated transcript of trial shown on Romanian and Austrian television),
So far, they have always claimed that we have built this country, we have paid our debts, but with this they bled the country to death and have hoarded enough money to ensure their escape.
text: The slow cooker demands less involvement on your part […] There are foods -- chicken, for example -- that you can overcook, but as long as you choose things that you want to cook to death anyway, it isn't going to happen.
ref: 2003 March 1, Mark Bittman, “Slow and Low Is the Way to Go”, in New York Times:
text: "I don't want to revisit his view and my view about whether I should have retired and who said what then," he told ABC Radio.
"That's been done to death."
ref: 2010 October 27, “Howard says leader[s]hip row 'done to death'”, in The Sydney Morning Herald:
synonyms: ad nauseam
to pieces
qualifier: degree
glosses: To a great degree; to the greatest degree possible, to excess.