All 8 Uses of
perish
in
David Copperfield
- Can I say of her face — altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is — that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street?†
Chpt 1-3
- A certain man named Gregory, who was foreman of the packers, and another named Tipp, who was the carman, and wore a red jacket, used to address me sometimes as 'David': but I think it was mostly when we were very confidential, and when I had made some efforts to entertain them, over our work, with some results of the old readings; which were fast perishing out of my remembrance.†
Chpt 10-12
- I even walk, on two or three occasions, in a sickly, spoony manner, round and round the house after the family are gone to bed, wondering which is the eldest Miss Larkins's chamber (and pitching, I dare say now, on Mr. Larkins's instead); wishing that a fire would burst out; that the assembled crowd would stand appalled; that I, dashing through them with a ladder, might rear it against her window, save her in my arms, go back for something she had left behind, and perish in the flames.†
Chpt 16-18
- I am imperfectly consoled for this disappointment by the sacred pledge, the perished flower.†
Chpt 16-18 *
- Mr. Micawber told us, that when he heard her sing the first one, on the first occasion of his seeing her beneath the parental roof, she had attracted his attention in an extraordinary degree; but that when it came to Little Tafflin, he had resolved to win that woman or perish in the attempt.†
Chpt 28-30
- He now sat down again very much out of breath, gasping at his pipe as if it contained a supply of that necessary, without which he must perish.†
Chpt 28-30
- The ground now covering all that could perish of my departed wife, I waited only for what Mr. Micawber called the 'final pulverization of Heep'; and for the departure of the emigrants.†
Chpt 52-54
- I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish before our eyes.†
Chpt 55-57
Definition:
-
(perish) to die -- especially in an unnatural way
or:
to be destroyed or cease to existeditor's notes: You may encounter an informal expression, "Perish the thought." It means that the speaker hopes the thought will cease to exist and the thing it represents will never happen.