death by a thousand cuts
1
8.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
muerte por mil cortes
- The constant harassment over the years felt like a death by a thousand cuts, slowly eroding her confidence.
Examples
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For many small businesses, the increasing regulations are a death by a thousand cuts that threaten their survival.
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Oppression is often death by a thousand cuts rather than a single wound.
Blog text (32) -
Taxes are a "death by a thousand cuts."
Blog text (1) -
I'm talking death by a thousand cuts.
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The slow death comes when a wall is covered again in small, ugly tags -- death by a thousand cuts.
Academic text (2007) -
It's been called "death by a thousand cuts" because we keep adapting to the new reality.
Blog text (31) -
In fact, this "death by a thousand cuts" was explicitly stated by al-Qaeda as its goal.
Blog text (29) -
It could be a quick event compressed in a couple of years, or it might be death by a thousand cuts: slow and painful.
Blog text (6) -
Proposal 2 addresses the entire scope of the many different attacks on collective bargaining—death by a thousand cuts, so to speak.
Blog text (19) -
Losing small clients one by one was a death by a thousand cuts for the company, ultimately leading to its closure.
How Gradual
Surface Forms
Morphology
death + by + a + thousand + cut
The expression uses a clear metaphor: 'death' caused 'by' many 'cuts' (small harms), so a learner who knows the constituent words can plausibly infer the idea of gradual, cumulative damage. However, the phrase conveys a conventionalized figurative meaning and nuance (gradual accumulation rather than a literal sequence of cuts) that may not be fully predictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
Death by a thousand cuts may come from an old, cruel punishment where a person was given many small cuts over time until they died. That's why people now use death by a thousand cuts to mean 'slow damage' or 'many small problems that add up'.