English

Verb

make away

1. (obsolete, intransitive) To depart, leave; to make off.
2. (obsolete, transitive) To destroy.
3. (obsolete, transitive) To kill.
   • Burton

     If a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away.

4. (obsolete, transitive) To get rid of, dispose of.
   • 1740, Samuel Richardson, Pamela, vol.II:

     ‘Will you,’ said he, ‘on your honour, let me see them uncurtailed, and not offer to make them away; no, not a single paper?’

5. (obsolete, reflexive) To kill oneself, commit suicide.
   • 1603, John Florio, translating Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, London: Edward Blount, OCLC 946730821, I.40:

     the people impatient of so many changes of fortune, tooke such a resolution unto death, that I have heard my father say, he kept accompt of five and twentie chiefe housholders, that in one weeke made them-selves away […].

   • 1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York Review of Books, 2001, p.263:

     Hostratus the friar took that book which Reuchlin had written against him, under the name of Epist. obscurorum vivorum, so to heart, that for shame and grief he made away himself.

Derived terms

• make away with