meet one's maker

meet one's maker verb: to die or to pass into the afterlife.

Verb

meet one's maker (third-person singular simple present meets one's maker, present participle meeting one's maker, simple past and past participle met one's maker)

(euphemistic, idiomatic) To die or to pass into the afterlife.
- On the gallows high he has met his Maker...Your victim waits for you to meet your Maker1871, Unknown (Execution ballad), “Execution of Frederick Baker.”, in Curiosities of Street Literature, Comprising "cocks," Or "catch Pennies", page 205
- He didn't die for a half-hour after that; nor did he speak again—aloud; but just a few seconds before he went to meet his Maker, his lips moved in a faint whisper.1918 September–November, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Land That Time Forgot”, in The Blue Book Magazine, Chicago, Ill.: Story-press Corp., →OCLC; republished as chapter IV, in Hugo Gernsback, editor...

third-person singular present	meets one's maker
present participle	meeting one's maker
past participle	met one's maker
past	met one's maker

In various religions, when a person dies, they go to a supernatural place like heaven where they may meet their creator deity.

What does meet one's maker mean?: Meet one's maker means to die or to pass into the afterlife.
What part of speech is meet one's maker?: Meet one's maker is a verb.
What is the past tense of meet one's maker?: The past tense of meet one's maker is met one's maker.

Adapted from Wiktionary: meet one's maker (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-meet one's maker.ogg.

Cite this entry: “meet one's maker.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meet_one%27s_maker. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.