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  • bury
    bury
    verb (used with object)
    to put in the ground and cover with earth.
  • Bury
    Bury
    noun
    a town in NW England, in Bury unitary authority, Greater Manchester: an early textile centre. Pop: 60 178 (2001)
Synonyms

bury

American  
[ber-ee] / ˈbɛr i /

verb (used with object)

buries, present (3rd person singular) buried, past participle, past burying present participle
  1. to put in the ground and cover with earth.

    The pirates buried the chest on the island.

  2. to put (a corpse) in the ground or a vault, or into the sea, often with ceremony.

    They buried the sailor with full military honors.

    Synonyms:
    inhume, entomb, inter
    Antonyms:
    exhume, disinter
  3. to plunge in deeply; cause to sink in.

    to bury an arrow in a target.

  4. to cover in order to conceal from sight.

    She buried the card in the deck.

    Synonyms:
    secrete, hide
    Antonyms:
    uncover
  5. to immerse (oneself).

    He buried himself in his work.

  6. to put out of one's mind.

    to bury an insult.

  7. to consign to obscurity; cause to appear insignificant by assigning to an unimportant location, position, etc..

    Her name was buried in small print at the end of the book.


noun

buries plural
  1. Nautical. housing.

idioms

  1. bury the hatchet, to become reconciled or reunited.

  2. bury one's head in the sand, to avoid reality; ignore the facts of a situation.

    You cannot continue to bury your head in the sand—you must learn to face facts.

bury 1 British  
/ ˈbɛrɪ /

verb

  1. to place (a corpse) in a grave, usually with funeral rites; inter

  2. to place in the earth and cover with soil

  3. to lose through death

  4. to cover from sight; hide

  5. to embed; sink

    to bury a nail in plaster

  6. to occupy (oneself) with deep concentration; engross

    to be buried in a book

  7. to dismiss from the mind; abandon

    to bury old hatreds

  8. to cease hostilities and become reconciled

  9. to refuse to face a problem

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Bury 2 British  
/ ˈbɛrɪ /

noun

  1. a town in NW England, in Bury unitary authority, Greater Manchester: an early textile centre. Pop: 60 178 (2001)

  2. a unitary authority in NW England, in Greater Manchester. Pop: 181 900 (2003 est). Area: 99 sq km (38 sq miles)

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

Inflected Forms

Nouns

Participles

Conjugated Forms

Present

Past

Future

Etymology

Origin of bury

First recorded before 1000; Middle English berien, buryen, Old English byrgan “to bury, conceal”; akin to Old English beorgan “to hide, protect, preserve”; cognate with Dutch, German bergen, Gothic bairgan, Old Norse bjarga

Explanation

When you dig a hole in the ground, put an object in the hole, and cover it up with dirt, you bury it. Your dog might prefer spending the majority of his time digging holes to bury his toy collection. You can bury something to hide it, or it can be part of a funeral ritual to bury a person who's died. You could also predict that the coming snow will bury the city, or you might bury your face in your hands if you were feeling dejected. The root of bury is the Proto-Indo-European word bhergh, "to protect or preserve." If you bury your money in the yard, maybe you're trying to protect it from thieves.

Keep Reading on Vocabulary.com

Vocabulary lists containing bury

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

"It is not a natural order. I'm not supposed to bury my son," she told the court.

From BBC Jul. 24, 2026

A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one.

From The Wall Street Journal Jul. 20, 2026

Together, these processes erase or bury many ancient impact craters.

From Science Daily Jul. 18, 2026

“All I want is to bury my son beside his brothers,” Al-Zaharnah said, his voice quiet as he stared at the excavator.

From Los Angeles Times Jul. 9, 2026

They’ll bury him and make him into everything he wasn’t.

From "On the Come Up" by Angie Thomas

A consultation will be held over the proposals, which would concentrate British Sugar's beet processing operations at Wissington in west Norfolk, Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk and Newark in Nottinghamshire.

From BBC Jul. 21, 2026

Bury got into a kayak but there were no oars nearby to help him paddle, he told the station.

From Los Angeles Times Jun. 30, 2026

Katherine Ahluwalia, of domestic abuse charity Restore Women's Aid in Bury St Edmunds, said deepfakes were part of a wider issue related to social media.

From BBC Jun. 5, 2026

A new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution examines the remains of 132 individuals buried in a large megalithic tomb near Bury, about 50 kilometers north of Paris.

From Science Daily Apr. 22, 2026

“Keep this. Bury it with her when you take her back home.”

From "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys

The road ahead is still uncertain as Iran buries the last of the first-generation founders of its 1979 revolution.

From BBC Jul. 7, 2026

Dozens of crumbling buildings in Venezuela's decimated earthquake zone bear a spray-painted letter 'D' -- a sign that buries any hope of finding life beneath the rubble.

From Barron's Jul. 1, 2026

A revamped Rose Garden that buries the past and statues that diminish what the people they depict stood for.

From Slate May 18, 2026

She buries some of her most colorful observations in the endnotes.

From The Wall Street Journal Apr. 3, 2026

“But this one, Aragog, the first one Hagrid ever got, it died last night. He’s devastated. He wants company while he buries it and I said I’d go.”

From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling

Finding the biologically important ones is difficult because genuine peptide hormones are relatively rare and can be buried among large numbers of ordinary fragments created during normal protein processing and breakdown.

From Science Daily Jul. 24, 2026

A month after the earthquakes, search efforts continue for victims whose remains might be buried underneath rubble, but operations have evolved to focus on post-earthquake humanitarian aid and rebuilding.

From Barron's Jul. 23, 2026

“The military options here aren’t great. The site is likely too deeply buried for U.S. munitions to penetrate, so it can’t be ‘destroyed,’” Eric Brewer, of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, wrote on X.

From The Wall Street Journal Jul. 22, 2026

"Not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy," he wrote.

From BBC Jul. 19, 2026

Grandma says she’s gonna be buried with it.

From "Split the Sky" by Marie Arnold

After months of burying the accusations, and more than two years of dithering, the International Criminal Court at last fired its prosecutor, Karim Khan.

From The Wall Street Journal Jul. 24, 2026

"I just came from burying my father and mother, and I came here to rescue my sister," she said.

From Barron's Jul. 3, 2026

"We're not going to change the stigma that still exists by burying our heads in the sand and ignoring it anymore, but by getting it out there," he says.

From BBC Jun. 26, 2026

But a big part of him burying himself has so much to do with his brother, with his family.

From Los Angeles Times Jun. 26, 2026

I pull the ribbon from the spout and shove it into my bag, burying it beneath a graveyard of almost-used-up pencils, a sketchbook, and a pack of cinnamon chewing gum.

From "Starfish" by Akemi Dawn Bowman

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