Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
to eat his gun

to eat his gun

9.9
To say you want to kill yourself to show you feel very desperate, often offensive
  • idiom
  • Offensive
translation icon : [OFENSIVO] decir que va a suicidarse
  • He was so overwhelmed by work that he felt like eating his gun.

Examples

  • She joked that if she failed the interview again, she'd eat her gun.

  • After losing the game, Tom felt like he could eat his gun.

  • After hearing the bad news, he said he wanted to eat his gun.

  • Don't eat his gun over a small mistake!

  • After hearing the awful news, he jokingly said he wanted to eat his gun.

  • Feeling completely defeated, she remarked that she might as well eat her gun.

  • He told his friend that if he didn't get the promotion, he would eat his gun.

Synonyms

to eat one's gun
vsto eat his gun
  • NSFW
9.9

To say as a joke that you will kill yourself because you feel very frustrated

refers more generally to strong distress or despair without literal suicidal intent

Surface Forms

eat his gun infinitive
ate his gun past
eaten his gun past participle
eating his gun present participle
eats his gun third person singular

Morphology

eat + his + gun

The meaning 'to feel or express extreme distress' cannot be predicted from the literal constituents 'eat' (consume), 'his' (possessive), and 'gun' (weapon); the possessive and weapon imagery do not map onto emotional distress in a compositional way. This is an idiomatic, hyperbolic phrase whose sense is language-specific and unpredictable, so a B1 learner who knows the individual words would not reliably infer the MWE meaning.

Etymology

Eat his gun may come from the shocking image of someone so upset that he would try to eat a gun. That's why the phrase is used to mean 'to feel extreme despair'.