Winterkill

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The event that leads to the death of flora and fauna as a result of extreme cold conditions during the winter season
2. A seasonal situation in which certain plants and animals fail to survive due to harsh weather experienced throughout winter
3. The phenomenon where extreme cold during the winter results in the death of various plant and animal species occurs universally

Etymology: "Winterkill" is about as transparent as compounds get: "winter" plus "kill," with the sense that the cold itself does the killing. The word is a verb in the sense of a plant or animal dying over the cold months, but the compound is built from two plain English words that have been in the language for a very long time. The "kill" element is the more interesting half. Its ancestor in Old English, "cyllan," originally meant to strike or beat, and was tied to the idea of striking someone dead, not the broader sense of ending life that it has now. Pairing it with "winter" produces a noun-plus-verb construction that reads as the season being the agent of death, a phrasing English speakers have long used for frost, snow, and cold.

Synonyms: kill off, die

Antonyms: survive, thrive