Suffocate
adj, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 To suffer, or cause someone to suffer, from severely reduced oxygen intake to the body. ergative
"Open the hatch, he is suffocating in the airlock!"
- 2 struggle for breath; have insufficient oxygen intake wordnet
- 3 To die due to, or kill someone by means of, insufficient oxygen supply to the body. ergative
"He suffocated his wife by holding a pillow over her head."
- 4 feel uncomfortable for lack of fresh air wordnet
- 5 To overwhelm, or be overwhelmed (by a person or issue), as though with oxygen deprivation. ergative, figuratively
"I'm suffocating under this huge workload."
Show 6 more definitions
- 6 be asphyxiated; die from lack of oxygen wordnet
- 7 To destroy; to extinguish. transitive
"to suffocate fire"
- 8 suppress the development, creativity, or imagination of wordnet
- 9 become stultified, suppressed, or stifled wordnet
- 10 impair the respiration of or obstruct the air passage of wordnet
- 11 deprive of oxygen and prevent from breathing wordnet
- 1 Suffocated, choked. obsolete
- 2 Smothered, overwhelmed. obsolete
"This chaos, when degree is suffocate, follows the choking"
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"I thought I was going to suffocate on the crowded train."
Etymology
The adjective is first attested in the 1420's, 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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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.