Meaning & use
suicide
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Meanings
nouncountable or uncountable
The act of deliberately causing your own death.
Grammar: Uncountable in general (suicide prevention) and countable for events (two suicides were reported).
Patterns
- commit suicide
- die by suicide
- suicide of someone
The report examined suicide among young adults and what could prevent it.
Schools now teach staff how to spot warning signs of suicide.
Many news outlets say died by suicide rather than commit suicide.
noununcountablefigurative
An action that will almost certainly destroy the person or group who carries it out.
Grammar: Figurative, as in political suicide or career suicide.
Patterns
- political suicide
- career suicide
Raising taxes before an election would be political suicide.
Quitting without another job lined up felt like career suicide.
Launching the product that early was commercial suicide.
adjectivebefore a noun
Involving a person who intends to die while carrying out an attack.
Grammar: Comes before a noun: a suicide bomber.
The news described a suicide attack on a market.
Police investigated a suicide bomber who targeted the station.
The film depicts a suicide mission in wartime.
Word forms
| plural | suicides |
|---|
Common combinations
- suicide prevention
- The hospital runs a suicide prevention program for teenagers.
- die by suicide
- Experts urge reporters to say die by suicide, not commit suicide.
- suicide hotline
- A suicide hotline is open day and night.
- suicide rate
- The suicide rate fell after the new support services began.
- career suicide
- Criticizing the boss in public is career suicide.
- suicide note
- The detective found no suicide note at the scene.
Synonyms and how they differ
- self-harm
- Self-harm means hurting yourself, often without wanting to die, while suicide means taking your own life.
- self-destruction
- Self-destruction is broader and can describe harmful behavior over time or a figurative ruin, not only a single act of ending life.
- ruin
- Ruin is the neutral word for serious damage, while the figurative use of suicide stresses that the damage is self-inflicted.
Word family
- suicidal adjective
- thinking about or likely to end your own life; also very risky
- suicidally adverb
- in a way that is extremely reckless
Commonly confused: suicide or homicide?
suicide vs homicide
Homicide is the killing of another person, whereas suicide is the killing of oneself.
Practice
Publicly insulting the voters just before the election would be political ___.
Choose one answer.
Political suicide means an action that will destroy your own political chances. The other options do not describe self-inflicted ruin.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “suicide”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.