killer
Pluralkillers
Pluralkillers
- 1A person, animal, or thing that kills.
Detectives believe the killer knew the victim well.
Infections that are easy to treat today were once major killers of young children.
Similarmurderer
- 2
- 3Excellent, very good, or impressively cool.
The band played a killer set that kept the whole crowd dancing until midnight.
She came back from Italy with a killer recipe for lasagna.
Similarawesome, cool, excellent, brilliant, dope
Note
Slang praise that comes right before its noun: a killer band, a killer view, a killer feature. In that slot it can be confused with the deadly adjective of killer bee and killer robot, and the noun decides which is meant. It also takes very, as in that very killer dish. Conversation and lively reviews suit it; formal writing does not.
- 4A person or thing that is remarkably impressive.
With that voice and that stage presence, the young singer is a real killer.
The album has a few weak songs, but the closing track is a killer.
Similarstandout, showstopper
Oppositedud
Note
The praise still carries the violent image inside it. Justin Bieber's "Intentions" (2020) makes the joke explicit, praising looks so stunning that they knock people dead. Said of a person, it compliments looks or talent; said of a thing, it is the noun partner of the slang adjective.
- 5Something that causes stress or is extremely difficult, especially something that could make someone fail at a task.
The last question on the exam was a killer, and half the class left it blank.
Those early-morning shifts are killers when you also have a newborn at home.
Note
It most often arrives in a plain frame after the ordeal: that test was a killer, the final hill was a killer. The same frame also carries the admiring sense, since the closing track is a killer is praise, so the subject and the tone tell the listener whether the speaker suffered or was impressed.
- 6Short for killer whale.
The guide said the black-and-white whale near the boat was a killer, probably hunting seals.
Scientists tagged a young killer to learn how the pod hunts sea lions.
Note
A clipped name that leans on context. Sarah Regal Riedman and Elton T. Gustafson's Home is the Sea: for Whales (1966) shows the safe order: the killer whale is named in full, then becomes simply the killer, really a large dolphin that Linnaeus classified as Orcinus orca. Without whales already in view, the bare word reads as someone or something that kills.
- 7Something so far ahead of its rivals that it effectively wipes them out.
Reviewers hailed the cheap tablet as a laptop killer, and laptop sales did dip that year.
Free video-calling apps proved to be the killer of expensive international phone calls.
Note
It works best as a compound, with the threatened rival in front: digital streaming platforms are CD killers. The first noun names what is being pushed out, the same shape as a bird killer in the literal sense, only here the victim is a product, a format or a habit rather than a living thing.
- 8
- 9A knockout game of darts or pool for several players, who are eliminated until a single winner remains.
On Friday nights the regulars gather around the dartboard for a few rounds of killer.
With six friends waiting for the pool table, we played killer so everyone could join in.
Note
It is played for lives rather than points: each player starts with a few and drops out once they are lost. Darts and pool share both the name and the system. As the name of a game it is uncountable and takes no article, so people play killer, or a few rounds of killer, not a killer.
- 10A club used for killing fish once they have been caught.
He landed the salmon, then reached for the killer in his tackle bag.
Carry a killer in the boat so any fish you plan to eat can be dealt with quickly.
- 11A particularly heavy handstamp, or part of one, struck on mail and often obscuring much of the postage stamp.
The stamp would be worth far more if a heavy killer had not blotted out the portrait.
The dealer's album held envelopes struck with killers carved in the shape of stars and shields.
Note
Its job is to stop a stamp from being used twice: bars, rings or a solid blot struck across the design deface it for good. On an envelope it often sits beside a separate postmark that gives the town and date, and the two together make up the cancellation.
- 12Another name for the virama, a diacritical mark in Indic scripts that silences a vowel or a consonant.
When a Thai word keeps a silent letter from its Sanskrit spelling, a killer is written above that letter.
The new font finally rendered the killer correctly, so the two consonants joined into one cluster.
Similarvirama
Note
The nickname says what the mark does: it kills a sound, which is why some writers call it the vowel killer. Individual scripts have their own names for it, pulli in Tamil and kaaran in Thai, while Unicode's character names use virama throughout. The Thai kaaran can even silence two letters at once: the consonant it sits over and the one just before it.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of killer apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Middle English killer (also kyller); it can be analysed as kill + -er.