Euthanase

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To put a person or animal to death painlessly in order to relieve severe and incurable suffering
2. To bring about the gentle death of a sufferer, usually by administering a drug, to spare them further pain
3. Causing a patient with an incurable and painful illness to die peacefully through a deliberate, medically assisted act

Etymology: "Euthanase" is a back-formation from "euthanasia," meaning the verb was created by stripping an ending off an existing noun, rather than being built up from roots. Its parent, "euthanasia," comes from Greek elements meaning "good" and "death," so the sense of a gentle, easy death is built into the word from the start. Speakers often form verbs this way: they see a noun ending in "-asia" or "-ia" and assume the shorter stem is a verb. The result is a word that looks like a regular English verb but was never a verb in its source language. "Euthanase" sits alongside the more common "euthanize," which follows the same pattern and means the same thing. Use "euthanase" when you want the act of ending a life painlessly stated as a verb. Its meaning is narrow: it refers to the deliberate, painless ending of life, usually of a human or animal in suffering, and it is not a general word for death.

Synonyms: put down, destroy, mercy-kill

Antonyms: revive, resuscitate