pass away

Idioms  

1. Also,. Die, as in He passed away last week, or After Grandma passes on we'll sell the land, or I hear he's about to pass over. All these terms are euphemisms for dying, although the verb pass alone as well as pass away have been used in the sense of “pass out of existence, die” since the 1300s. The two variants—adding on [c. 1800] and over [c. 1900]—allude to moving to some other-worldly realm.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

pass away

There was a moment last season when Roberto de Zerbi turned to his Tottenham players and asked: "Did we pass away?"

From BBC ● Aug. 5, 2026

If you do pass away before your spouse, he will likely have saved significantly more money than if he had stayed single and paid all of those expenses himself.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 24, 2026

"We look at all of the data we have in our telephones, CCTV, the audio. There's that wealth of documentary evidence. And of course, when you go back such a long time, witnesses pass away."

From BBC ● May 26, 2026

When his children pass away, he continues, maybe they’ll be buried on the moon, or on Mars.

From Slate ● May 8, 2026

He was the first of his siblings to pass away.

From "Reaching for the Moon" by Katherine Johnson

Related Words

• die
• expire
• perish
• succumb