See death by a thousand cuts in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"word": "death by a thousand paper cuts"
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"Lingchi, a form of execution."
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"ref": "2010 April 10, Tim Webb, “Heavy industry claims carbon emission targets are ‘death by a thousand cuts‘”, in The Guardian:",
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"ref": "2022 January 12, Sir Michael Holden, “Reform of the workforce or death by a thousand cuts?”, in RAIL, number 948, page 25:",
"text": "There are only months left to save our railway from a vicious downward spiral. Do we choose reform of the workforce or death by a thousand cuts? Who will stand up and speak for the industry to avoid such a massive own goal?",
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"(figurative) A gradual decline or failure as the result of many minor mishaps."
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"word": "death by a thousand cuts"
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Download raw JSONL data for death by a thousand cuts meaning in English (2.1kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-01 using wiktextract (142890b and 1d3fdbf). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.