Killer

How to spell killer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce killer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does killer mean?

1. nounA person, animal, or thing that kills or causes death.
2. adjectiveInformally, extremely impressive, excellent, or formidable.

Killer in a sentence

• noun

  Detectives spent months hunting the killer across three counties.

• adjective

  The band closed the set with a killer guitar solo.

• noun

  The dense smoke, not the flames, was the real killer in the fire.

• adjective

  Her presentation included a killer argument that won over the board.

Where does killer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word is built on the verb 'kill', which appears in Middle English as 'killen' or 'cullen', meaning to strike or to put to death. Its earlier history is genuinely murky: it may descend from an unrecorded Old English form related to 'cwellan', meaning 'to kill or destroy', the same root that survives in the modern word 'quell'. The agent suffix '-er', inherited from Old English and the wider Germanic family, turns the verb into a noun naming the doer, exactly as 'bake' yields 'baker'. By the late Middle Ages 'killer' was firmly in use for a person or animal that kills. The much later informal sense, meaning something excellent or extremely impressive, grew out of slang in the twentieth century, where 'killer' came to mean overwhelmingly good rather than deadly.

How the word is built

• kill (Middle English killen: to strike, slay)
• -er (agent suffix: one who or that which does)