dead and buried
8
3.9
- idiom
- Informal
:
muerto y enterrado
- By the time you return... everyone you know will be dead and buried.
- already dead and buried
- all dead and buried
- long dead and buried
Even in Germany, where nuclear power was all but dead and buried, there's talk of bringing it back.
- Even in Germany, where nuclear power was all but dead and buried, there's talk of bringing it back.
Examples
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Even in Germany, where nuclear power was all but dead and buried, there's talk of bringing it back.
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But enough of these dead and buried secrets.
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We'll be dead and buried by the time it makes it down here.
-
All that's dead and buried.
-
The heavyweights division has been dead and buried for a long while ago.
Blog text (34) -
Why, for all they know, I could be dead and buried and not so much as a condolence note to my husband and children.
Fiction book (1991) -
He's dead and buried here in a Seattle cemetery.
Fiction book (1997) -
I'm not a child anymore, and Romanian communism is dead and buried.
Academic text (2010) -
More conservative rags might even include a spiteful article pronouncing the much-feared "greenhouse effect" dead and buried.
Fiction book (1998) -
After years of debate, the issue is finally dead and buried, and we can move on.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
Not alive or working, for example a battery with no power
∞
5.5
No longer alive
3
5.6
Completely finished and settled so nothing more needs doing
Antonyms
How Final
Surface Forms
Morphology
Both constituents signal finality—'dead' (no longer active) and 'buried' (put away permanently)—so a learner who knows those words can likely infer the sense of something being finished for good. However, the phrase is a conventionalized figurative intensifier used idiomatically for projects or issues, so the meaning is not entirely predictable from the parts.
Etymology
The idiom dead and buried comes from the clear image of someone who is dead and then buried in the ground. Because a buried person is gone and cannot return, the phrase now means 'completely finished' or 'over'.