to death

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• Rhymes: -ɛθ

to death

1. (literally) Until death occurs; so as to cause or result in death.

   bleed to death

   freeze to death

   beat to death

   • 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:

     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.

2. (degree, hyperbolic) To a great degree; to the greatest degree possible, to excess.

   Synonyms: ad nauseam, to pieces

   I was bored to death in that meeting.

   • 1805, Songs for the Nursery, page 5:

     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.

   • 1843, Theodore S. Fay, chapter X, in Hoboken: A Romance of New York‎, volume 2, New York: Harper & Brothers, page 59:

     “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.”

   • 1915, Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson, The How and Why Library:

     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.

   • 1933, Choudhary Rahmat Ali et al., Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever?:

     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.

   • 1948, Albert E. Idell, The Great Blizzard, New York: Henry Holt and Company, page 174:

     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.

   • 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:

     She giggled furiously, the bosom in violent action. “Ah'm gonna love it to death here.”

   • 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.

   • 2003 March 1, Mark Bittman, “Slow and Low Is the Way to Go”, in New York Times:

     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.

   • 2010 October 27, “Howard says leaderhip row 'done to death'”, in The Sydney Morning Herald:

     "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."

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