Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
lay down one's life en · VERB
Meanings
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(literary) To give one's life, to die.
Only history can tell us where China will go from here. The Chinese leadership's brutal crackdown on students seeking fundamental democratic rights makes it difficult to chart the future. Those brave students who laid down their lives against the tanks of Tiananmen Square confirmed what I'd always believed: that no totalitarian society can bottle up the instinctive drive of men and women to be free, and that once you give a captive people a little freedom, they'll demand still more.
1990, Ronald Reagan, An American Life, Pocket Books, →ISBN, pages 372–373:Gold was there, and get at it they would, and at any cost. Many of our fellow-passengers suffered a rude awakening, and more than one man laid down his life in the quest for gold that had taken so fierce a hold upon him.
1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 142:
Forms