killing

adj

1. That literally deprives of life; lethal, deadly, fatal.
2. (dated, idiomatic)Devastatingly attractive.

   “Should true Proportion ev'ry Mortal grace, / And Semetry be seen in ev'ry Face: / Beauty no longer would be thought divine, / Nor would its Charms with half the Lustre shine: / No courtly Dame a killing Look could boast, / If once the Foils of Homeliness were lost.”

   “He sprang to open the door for the ladies, when they retired, with the most killing grace […]”

3. (idiomatic, informal)That makes one ‘die’ with laughter; very funny.

   “Livia found her ‘killing’, and derived such amusement from her Martinique French that he was forced to enjoy her as well.”

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The act of killing.

   “In fact, Tarzan had never killed for “pleasure,” nor to him was there pleasure in killing.”

2. (countable, uncountable)An instance of someone being killed.

   “The outrage over the brutal killings of peaceful demonstrators in Lhasa in March 1989 quickly faded after the massacres in Beijing in June.”

   “A police officer in neighboring Mekit county told RFA he was informed that police were searching the houses for a suspect from Pichan (in Chinese, Shanshan) county in Xinjiang’s Turpan prefecture when the killings occurred.”

   “But the split-screen nature of this moment in his presidency was underscored when Mr. Trump devoted the first nine minutes of his speech to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent protests and riots unfolding in cities across the country.”

   “A man shot dead 12 people in a rampage in a small town in Montenegro before dying from self-inflicted injuries early on Thursday, authorities said, in one of the tiny Balkan nation’s worst mass killings.”

   “In the first year of her administration, ACLED data shows, Sheinbaum’s efforts to contain violence have generally coincided with a drop in attacks against civilians; since January, civilian killings have declined in nearly every Mexican state.”

3. (countable, informal, uncountable, usually)A large amount of money.

   “He made a killing on the stock market.”

   “The result is, in the end, the superintendent agrees to hold up another race, and the victim arranges to obtain all the money he can get in order to bet it on a sure thing. When the great "killing" is made, and the stripped victim goes back to consult with the superintendent[…]”

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of kill

name

1. A surname.