burke
pronunciation
How to pronounce burke in British English:
UK [bɜ:k]
How to pronounce burke in American English:
US [bɜk]
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- Verb:
- murder without leaving a trace on the body
- get rid of, silence, or suppress
Word Origin
- burke
- burke: [19] In present-day English burke means ‘avoid’, as in ‘burke an issue’, but it can be traced back semantically via ‘suppress, hush up’ to ‘suffocate so as to provide a body for surgical dissection’. In this sense it was a macabre adoption of the name of William Burke (1792– 1829), an Irishman who with his colleague William Hare set up a profitable but nefarious business in early 19th-century Edinburgh providing cadavers for surgeons to dissect.To begin with they obtained their supplies by robbing graves, but eventually, in order to get higher-quality material, they took to murdering people, generally by suffocation or strangling. Burke was executed.
- Burke (v.)
- family name (first recorded 1066), from Anglo-Norman pronunciation of Old English burgh. Not common in England itself, but it took root in Ireland, where William de Burgo went in 1171 with Henry II and later became Earl of Ulster. As shorthand for a royalty reference book, it represents "A General and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the United Kingdom," first issued 1826, compiled by John Burke (1787-1848). As a verb meaning "murder by smothering," it is abstracted from William Burk, executed in Edinburgh 1829 for murdering several persons to sell their bodies for dissection.
Example
- 1. Burke will start working at facebook as a data scientist this year .
- 2. Once when asked about the attempts burke said he did not mind .
- 3. When burke finally returned to berlin the papers reported his surprisingly happy demeanor .
- 4. In fact it 's because of burke that karle 's whole effort got under way .
- 5. The second anecdote concerns burke 's reaction to the opera itself which he attended every night of its run .