drown.
To die from suffocation while immersed in water or other fluid.
Meaning & usage
To die from suffocation while immersed in water or other fluid.
When I was a baby, I nearly drowned in the bathtub.
To kill by suffocating in water or another liquid.
The car thief fought with an officer and tried to drown a police dog before being shot while escaping.
To be flooded: to be inundated with or submerged in (literally) water or (figuratively) other things; to be overwhelmed.
We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom.
To inundate, submerge, overwhelm.
He drowns his sorrows in buckets of chocolate ice cream.
To obscure, particularly amid an overwhelming volume of other items.
The answers intelligence services seek are often drowned in the flood of information they can now gather.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English drownen, drounen, drunen (“to drown”), of obscure and uncertain origin. The OED suggests an unattested Old English form *drūnian. Harper 2001 points to Old English druncnian, ġedruncnian (> Middle English drunknen, dronknen (“to drown”)), "probably influenced" by Old Norse drukkna (cf. Icelandic drukkna, Danish drukne (“to drown”)). Funk & Wagnall's has 'of uncertain origin'. It has been theorised (see e.g. ODS) that it may represent a direct loan of Old Norse drukkna, but this is described by the OED as being "on phonetic and other grounds [...] highly improbable", unless one considers the possibility of an unattested variant in Old Norse *drunkna.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.