See kill one's darlings in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "A piece of advice to prospective authors that they must kill their “darlings”, i.e. suppress overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. Often attributed to William Faulkner (1897–1962), but already expressed earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch (murder one's darlings); more recently popularized by Stephen King.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "kills one's darlings",
"tags": [
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]
},
{
"form": "killing one's darlings",
"tags": [
"participle",
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]
},
{
"form": "killed one's darlings",
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"name": "en-verb"
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"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1965, Raymond Léopold Bruckerger, The History of Jesus Christ, page 161:",
"text": "Someone asked William Faulkner what the supreme law of art was, and he replied in three words: \"Kill your darlings!\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 January 20, Virginia Heffernan, “Art in the Age of Franchising”, in New York Times:",
"text": "[Fans] won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love […]. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2011 January 30, Theodore Bale, “Choreographer Koresh debuts Sense of Human”, in Houston Chronicle:",
"text": "In sharp contrast to choreographers who try to build a repertory that reflects an ongoing personal style, Koresh prefers to \"kill his darlings,\" as he puts it, and start from scratch.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2015 March 28, Ted Loos, “The Whitney Museum’s New Home”, in Wall Street Journal:",
"text": "As the curators sifted through more than 100 years of artworks, disagreements inevitably arose. “We all had to kill our darlings,” says Foster.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To destroy things or characters, particularly in art, of which one is fond, and thereby conflicted about."
],
"id": "en-kill_one's_darlings-en-verb-lpJhrwJw",
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],
[
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]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To destroy things or characters, particularly in art, of which one is fond, and thereby conflicted about."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "murder one's darlings"
},
{
"word": "murder your darlings"
}
],
"tags": [
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"word": "kill one's darlings"
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{
"etymology_text": "A piece of advice to prospective authors that they must kill their “darlings”, i.e. suppress overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. Often attributed to William Faulkner (1897–1962), but already expressed earlier by Arthur Quiller-Couch (murder one's darlings); more recently popularized by Stephen King.",
"forms": [
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"present",
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"third-person"
]
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{
"form": "killing one's darlings",
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},
{
"form": "killed one's darlings",
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1965, Raymond Léopold Bruckerger, The History of Jesus Christ, page 161:",
"text": "Someone asked William Faulkner what the supreme law of art was, and he replied in three words: \"Kill your darlings!\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2008 January 20, Virginia Heffernan, “Art in the Age of Franchising”, in New York Times:",
"text": "[Fans] won’t participate in online dialogues and events, visit message boards and chat rooms or design games. As a result, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built, starving even the shows fans profess to love […]. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2011 January 30, Theodore Bale, “Choreographer Koresh debuts Sense of Human”, in Houston Chronicle:",
"text": "In sharp contrast to choreographers who try to build a repertory that reflects an ongoing personal style, Koresh prefers to \"kill his darlings,\" as he puts it, and start from scratch.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2015 March 28, Ted Loos, “The Whitney Museum’s New Home”, in Wall Street Journal:",
"text": "As the curators sifted through more than 100 years of artworks, disagreements inevitably arose. “We all had to kill our darlings,” says Foster.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To destroy things or characters, particularly in art, of which one is fond, and thereby conflicted about."
],
"links": [
[
"destroy",
"destroy"
],
[
"art",
"art"
],
[
"fond",
"fond"
],
[
"conflicted",
"conflicted"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To destroy things or characters, particularly in art, of which one is fond, and thereby conflicted about."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Arthur Quiller-Couch",
"Stephen King",
"William Faulkner"
]
}
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"synonyms": [
{
"word": "murder one's darlings"
},
{
"word": "murder your darlings"
}
],
"word": "kill one's darlings"
}
Download raw JSONL data for kill one's darlings meaning in English (3.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). 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.