PASS AWAY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does pass away mean? 

• PASS AWAY (verb)
  The verb PASS AWAY has 2 senses:

1. pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life

2. go out of existence

  Familiarity information: PASS AWAY used as a verb is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PASS AWAY (verb)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Synonyms:

buy the farm; cash in one's chips; choke; conk; croak; decease; die; drop dead; exit; expire; give-up the ghost; go; kick the bucket; pass; pass away; perish; pop off; snuff it

Context example:

The old guy kicked the bucket at the age of 102

Hypernyms (to "pass away" is one way to...):

change state; turn (undergo a transformation or a change of position or action)

Verb group:

break; break down; conk out; die; fail; give out; give way; go; go bad (stop operating or functioning)

die (suffer or face the pain of death)

Troponyms (each of the following is one way to "pass away"):

abort (cease development, die, and be aborted)

asphyxiate; stifle; suffocate (be asphyxiated; die from lack of oxygen)

buy it; pip out (be killed or die)

drown (die from being submerged in water, getting water into the lungs, and asphyxiating)

predecease (die before; die earlier than)

famish; starve (die of food deprivation)

fall (die, as in battle or in a hunt)

succumb; yield (be fatally overwhelmed)

Sentence frame:

Somebody ----s

Sense 2

Meaning:

Go out of existence

Classified under:

Verbs of size, temperature change, intensifying, etc.

Context example:

She hoped that the problem would eventually pass away

Hypernyms (to "pass away" is one way to...):

cease; end; finish; stop; terminate (have an end, in a temporal, spatial, or quantitative sense; either spatial or metaphorical)

Sentence frame:

Something ----s

 Context examples 

Dear Mrs. Reed, said I, as I offered her the draught she required, think no more of all this, let it pass away from your mind.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

You are too young to know how the world changes every day, said Mrs. Creakle, and how the people in it pass away.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

Oh! why will such things ever pass away?

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

What so natural, as that anger should pass away and repentance succeed it?

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

It will pass away soon enough.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

He had been called in, had found the woman dying of pure senility, had actually seen her pass away, and had signed the certificate in due form.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The beginning, however, of every visit displayed none but the properest feelings, and this being of necessity so short might be hoped to pass away in unsullied cordiality.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)