Word.ws English Dictionary

bury

UK/ˈbɛɹi/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/ˈbeɹi/

bury verb: to kill or murder.

Verb

bury (third-person singular simple present buries, present participle burying, simple past and past participle buried)

  1. (figuratively, slang, transitive) To kill or murder.
    Synonyms:
    inurn
  2. (figuratively, humorous, transitive) To outlive.
    • Grandpa’s still in excellent health. He’ll bury us all!
    Synonyms:
    inurn
  3. (transitive) To place in the ground.
    • bury a bone; bury the embers
    • Later that morning, they wrapped Ian in a wildebeest skin and buried him near a shepherd tree.2013, Eleanor Morse, White Dog Fell From the Sky
  4. (figuratively, often, transitive) To hide or conceal as if by covering with earth or another substance.
    • She buried her face in the pillow, and I buried mine in my hands.
    • The splinter has buried itself under the nail.
    1. (figuratively, often, transitive) To render imperceptible by other, more prominent stimuli; to drown out.
      • vocals buried in the mix
    2. (broadly, figuratively, often, transitive) To overwhelm.
      • They buried us in paperwork.
      • Beyond the daily firefighting, these managers and executives are overwhelmed in details and buried in administrative work2013 November 17, Mike Weinberg, “Are You Moving the Needle on High Payoff Activity or Drowning in Details & Admin?”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)
  5. (figuratively, transitive) To suppress and hide away in one's mind.
    • secrets kept buried
    • She buried her shame and put on a smiling face.
  6. (figuratively, transitive) To put an end to; to abandon.
    • They buried their argument and shook hands.
    • Give me a bowl of wine. / In this I bury all unkindness, Cassius.1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Iulius Cæsar”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
  7. (transitive) To score (a goal).
    • You could feel the relief after Bendtner collected Wilshere's raking pass before cutting inside Carlos Edwards and burying his shot beyond Fulop.2011 January 25, Paul Fletcher, “Arsenal 3-0 Ipswich (agg. 3-1)”, in BBC
  8. (slang, transitive) To ruin the image or character of another wrestler; usually by embarrassing or defeating them in dominating fashion.

Noun (1)

bury (plural buries)

  1. (obsolete, transitive) A burrow.
    • Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out.1879, R[ichard] J[efferies], chapter II, in The Amateur Poacher, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., […], →OCLC
    • The conies had hundreds of buries under these trees, so close together that the problem was not to find a rabbit, but to find a rabbit far enough away from its hole.1958, T[erence] H[anbury] White, chapter I, in The Once and Future King, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, →ISBN, book I (The Sword in the Stone)

Noun (2)

bury (plural buries)

  1. (transitive) A borough; a manor
    • Indisputable, though very dim to modern vision, rests on its hill-slope that same Bury, Stow, or Town of St. Edmund; already a considerable place, not without traffic1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. 5, Twelfth Century”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book II (The Ancient Monk)

Proper noun capitalized: Bury

Bury (countable and uncountable, plural Burys)

  1. A village and civil parish in Huntingdonshire district, Cambridgeshire (OS grid ref TL2883).
  2. A town and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester.
  3. A hamlet in Brompton Regis parish, Somerset West and Taunton district, Somerset (OS grid ref SS9427).
  4. A village and civil parish in Chichester district, West Sussex (OS grid ref TQ0113).
  5. (abbreviation, ellipsis) Ellipsis of Bury St Edmunds.
  6. A village in Péruwelz municipality, Hainaut province, Belgium.
  7. A commune in Oise department, Hauts-de-France, France.
  8. A municipality in Le Haut-Saint-François Regional County Municipality, Estrie region, Quebec, Canada.
  9. A habitational surname from Old English.

bury meaning in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Bengali

bury in Hindi

to inter a corpse in a grave or tomb
गाड़ना gāṛnā, दफ़नाना dafnānā, दफ़न करना dafan karnā

bury in Marathi

to inter a corpse in a grave or tomb
गाडणे gāḍṇe

bury in Urdu

to inter a corpse in a grave or tomb
دَفَن کَرنا dafan karnā, گاڑْنا gāṛnā, دَفْنانا dafnānā

bury in Bengali

to inter a corpse in a grave or tomb
পোঁতা pō̃ta, মাটি দেওয়া maṭi deōẇa, গোর দেওয়া gōr deōẇa
More languagesFewer languages
bury in Assamese
পোত püt, কবৰ দে kobor de
bury in Nepali
दफनाउनुहोस्, दफनाउनु
bury in Tagalog
libing, maglibing, ilibing, madumog
bury in Arabic
دَفَنَ dafana, قَبَرَ qabara
bury in Malay
kubur
bury in Persian
دفن کردن dafn kardan, نگندن negandan
bury in Thai
ฝัง fǎng
bury in Vietnamese
chôn, mai táng
bury in Myanmar
မြှုပ်နှံ hmruphnam, မြှုပ် hmrup, မြေချ mrehkya.

Examples of bury in a sentence

  • She was buried with her mom and hopefully they are together now.
  • The pirates buried their seizings and marked the map with an X.
  • Marbles were among the treasures found buried in the ruins of Pompeii.

All 40 example sentences with bury

Synonyms of bury

Forms of bury

Verb
third-person singular presentburies
present participleburying
past participleburied
pastburied
Noun
pluralburies
Proper noun
pluralBurys

Past tense of bury: buried

Origin of bury

Middle English birien, berien, from Old English byrġan, from Proto-West Germanic *burgijan, from Proto-Germanic *burgijaną (“to keep safe”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *bʰergʰ- (“to defend, protect”). Cognate with Icelandic byrgja (“to cover, shut; to hold in”); West Frisian bergje (“to keep”), German bergen (“to save/rescue something”), Danish bjerge (“to save/rescue something or somebody”); also Eastern Lithuanian bir̃ginti (“to save, spare”), Russian бере́чь (beréčʹ, “to spare”), Ossetian ӕмбӕрзын (æmbærzyn, “to cover”). The spelling with ⟨u⟩ represents the pronunciation of the West Midland and Southern dialects, while the Modern English pronunciation with /ɛ/ is from the Kentish dialects. Compare typologically Russian хорони́ть (xoronítʹ) (akin to храни́ть (xranítʹ)), Polish chować.

See borough.

The place name means "fort," from Old English burg. Doublet of borough, Brough, and burgh.

Words formed from bury

Phrases with bury

Words that rhyme with bury

9 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about bury

What does bury mean?
Bury means to kill or murder.
What is bury in Hindi?
Bury in Hindi is गाड़ना (gāṛnā), दफ़नाना (dafnānā), दफ़न करना (dafan karnā). See Bury meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is bury?
Bury can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce bury?
Bury is pronounced /ˈbɛɹi/ (UK).
What is the past tense of bury?
The past tense of bury is buried.

Words near bury in the dictionary

  1. Burwells
  2. Burwick
  3. Burwood
  4. Burwood East
  5. Burwood Heights
  6. bury
  7. bury one's head in the sand
  8. Bury St Edmunds
  9. bury the hatchet
  10. bury the lead
  11. bury the lede

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bury (page history and authors); Bury (page history and authors); bury (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-bury.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bury.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bury. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.