Word.ws English Dictionary

breathe one's last

breathe one's last verb: to die.

Verb

breathe one's last (third-person singular simple present breathes one's last, present participle breathing one's last, simple past and past participle breathed one's last)

  1. (euphemistic, idiomatic) To die.
    • Ah, Warwick! Montague hath breathed his last;
      And to the latest gasp cried out for Warwick,c. 1591–1592 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Third Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard...
    • She breathed her last surrounded by her family and friends, commending them to God and the study of his word.1852 September 9, Thomas J. Plummer, “Obituary notices”, in The Millennial Harbinger, page 120
  2. (uncommon) To be defeated.
    • For the longest while, the loss didn't seem real. For going on four hours, I'd done pretty much what I wanted to on that mound. I couldn't just shut that off, now that we had finally breathed our last.2009, Ron Darling with Daniel Paisner, The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, page 236

Synonyms of breathe one's last

Forms of breathe one's last

third-person singular presentbreathes one's last
present participlebreathing one's last
past participlebreathed one's last
pastbreathed one's last

Origin of breathe one's last

Perhaps first used in Shakespeare's Henry VI, part 3 (c. 1591). Compare breathe (“to live”).

Questions about breathe one's last

What does breathe one's last mean?
Breathe one's last means to die.
What part of speech is breathe one's last?
Breathe one's last is a verb.
What is the past tense of breathe one's last?
The past tense of breathe one's last is breathed one's last.

Words near breathe one's last in the dictionary

  1. breathe down someone's neck
  2. breathe easy
  3. breathe freely
  4. breathe in
  5. breathe new life into
  6. breathe one's last
  7. breathe one's last breath
  8. breathe out
  9. breathe upon
  10. breathed
  11. breathed a sigh of relief

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: breathe one's last (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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