Word.ws English Dictionary

drive a stake through its heart

drive a stake through its heart verb: get rid of, destroy permanently or stop talking about.

Verb

drive a stake through its heart (third-person singular simple present drives a stake through its heart, present participle driving a stake through its heart, simple past drove a stake through its heart, past participle driven a stake through its heart)

  1. (idiomatic) get rid of, destroy permanently or stop talking about
    • The Chandlers also were interested in retaining the family fortune, not squandering it, and the Mirror-News was losing $2 million a year. If, the Chandlers thought, they could kill the Mirror-News and drive a stake through its heart, they would be much better off.1984, Peter Benjaminson, Death in the Afternoon: America's Newspaper Giants Struggle for Survival, Andrews, McMeel & Parker, →ISBN
    • "You can't reform ODOT," he says wearily, "you can only drive a stake through its heart."1999, Fred Siegel, Urban Society, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, →ISBN, page 125

Examples of drive a stake through its heart in a sentence

  • We hear great debate about how this is a bad treaty and we should defeat it and drive a stake through its heart, but what, then, should we do?2000, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, Final Review of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Treaty...
  • The only thing we can do with this hideous beast is kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it, and hope that it never rises again to terrorize the American people.2011, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means, Impediments to Job Creation: Hearing Before the Committee on Ways and...

Forms of drive a stake through its heart

third-person singular presentdrives a stake through its heart
present participledriving a stake through its heart
pastdrove a stake through its heart
past participledriven a stake through its heart

Origin of drive a stake through its heart

Refers to a common way of killing vampires in fiction.

Questions about drive a stake through its heart

What does drive a stake through its heart mean?
Drive a stake through its heart means get rid of, destroy permanently or stop talking about.
How do you use drive a stake through its heart in a sentence?
We hear great debate about how this is a bad treaty and we should defeat it and drive a stake through its heart, but what, then, should we do?
What part of speech is drive a stake through its heart?
Drive a stake through its heart is a verb.
What is the past tense of drive a stake through its heart?
The past tense of drive a stake through its heart is drove a stake through its heart.

Words near drive a stake through its heart in the dictionary

  1. drive a coach and horses through
  2. drive a coach and six through
  3. drive a hard bargain
  4. drive a nail in someone's coffin
  5. drive a nail where it will go
  6. drive a stake through its heart
  7. drive a truck through something
  8. drive a wedge
  9. drive at
  10. drive away
  11. drive back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: drive a stake through its heart (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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