suffocate.
To suffer, or cause someone to suffer, from severely reduced oxygen intake to the body.
Meaning & usage
To suffer, or cause someone to suffer, from severely reduced oxygen intake to the body.
Open the hatch, he is suffocating in the airlock!
To die due to, or kill someone by means of, insufficient oxygen supply to the body.
He suffocated his wife by holding a pillow over her head.
To overwhelm, or be overwhelmed (by a person or issue), as though with oxygen deprivation.
I'm suffocating under this huge workload.
To destroy; to extinguish.
to suffocate fire
Where this word comes from
The adjective is first attested in the 1420s, the verb in 1526; from Middle English suffocat(e) (“deprived of air, suffocated”), borrowed from Latin suffōcātus, the perfect passive participle of Latin suffōcō (see -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from sub- (“under, up to”) + fōx (“throat”, oblique stem in fōc-). Participial usage up until Early Modern English.
Suffocated, choked.
Smothered, overwhelmed.
Where this word comes from
The adjective is first attested in the 1420s, the verb in 1526; from Middle English suffocat(e) (“deprived of air, suffocated”), borrowed from Latin suffōcātus, the perfect passive participle of Latin suffōcō (see -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (adjective-forming suffix)), from sub- (“under, up to”) + fōx (“throat”, oblique stem in fōc-). Participial usage up until Early Modern English.
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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.