Demise

How to spell demise

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce demise

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does demise mean?

1. nounA person's death, or the end or collapse of something.

Demise in a sentence

• The company never recovered after the demise of its founder.

• Poor management led to the swift demise of the family business.

Where does demise come from?

Language of origin: French

Demise came into English in the fifteenth century from Anglo-French and Old French, where 'demise' was the feminine past participle of 'desmettre', meaning to dismiss, to send away, or to put down. That verb was built from the prefix 'des-' (down or away) and 'mettre' (to put or send), which traces back to the Latin 'mittere', meaning 'to send' or 'to let go', the same root that gives us 'mission', 'transmit', and 'dismiss'. Its earliest English use was strictly legal: a demise was the conveyance or transfer of an estate, typically by lease or by will, the act of putting property down into another's hands. From the transfer of a monarch's lands and authority on death came the phrase 'demise of the Crown', and by the eighteenth century the word had softened into a polite, formal term for death itself, and later for the end or collapse of anything. The spelling preserves the French '-ise' ending pronounced like 'ize', which is the main thing that catches writers out.

How the word is built

• de- (down, away)
• mise (a putting or sending, from Latin mittere 'to send, put')