buy the farm
buy the farm verb: to die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.
Verb
buy the farm (third-person singular simple present buys the farm, present participle buying the farm, simple past and past participle bought the farm)
- To die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.
- You're just as dead if you buy the farm in an "incident" as if you buy it in a declared war.1959, Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, page 131
- Then tracers laced the sky in front of me. Forget the shooting! If I get distracted now, I'll buy the farm anyway!1984, G. Harry Stine, Manna, page 221
- Synonyms:
- buy it, buy the plot, buy the ranch, buy the big one, kick the bucket, punch one's ticket, meet your maker
buy the farm meaning in Tamil
buy the farm in Tamil
- இறந்து போதல்
Examples of buy the farm in a sentence
- Shoot, if I knew you was gonna buy the farm I coulda asked for everything you got in the world...1995, Steve Allen, “Having a Good Time”, in Ann McDonough, Kent R. Brown, editors, A Grand Entrance, published 2000, →ISBN, page 212:
- They knew they might buy the farm tomorrow.2002, W. Barry Baird, Vietnam Journey, →ISBN, page 171:
Synonyms of buy the farm
- buy it
- buy the plot
- buy the ranch
- buy the big one
- kick the bucket
- punch one's ticket
- meet your maker
Forms of buy the farm
| third-person singular present | buys the farm |
|---|---|
| present participle | buying the farm |
| past participle | bought the farm |
| past | bought the farm |
Origin of buy the farm
Not known with certainty. Two long-held hypotheses are as follows: One describes combat soldiers wistfully wishing to go back home, buy a farm, and live peacefully there; later, after they had been killed in combat, their fellow soldiers would say that they had bought the farm (compare the established metaphor pattern of having gone to that big [whatever sort of nice place] in the sky). Another links the phrase to the idea that governments compensate farmers whose land is damaged by a military aircraft crash; a deceased pilot was thus said to have bought the farm, and the term eventually entered wider use. Still another links it to a sardonic attitude of farmers that farms are often so heavily mortgaged and farmers' finances so difficult that one could not finish buying one's farm until one was dead.
Questions about buy the farm
- What does buy the farm mean?
- Buy the farm means to die; generally, to die in battle or in a plane crash.
- What is buy the farm in Tamil?
- Buy the farm in Tamil is இறந்து போதல். See Buy the farm meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use buy the farm in a sentence?
- Shoot, if I knew you was gonna buy the farm I coulda asked for everything you got in the world...
- What part of speech is buy the farm?
- Buy the farm is a verb.
- What is the past tense of buy the farm?
- The past tense of buy the farm is bought the farm.
Words near buy the farm in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: buy the farm (page history and authors); buy the farm (Tamil Wiktionary) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-buy the farm.ogg.
Cite this entry: “buy the farm.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buy_the_farm. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.