Meaning
Wearing clothes chosen to make a maximum, devastating impression - stylishly or dramatically dressed so as to overwhelm admirers. Now used of any gender; the outfit is understood as an instrument of conquest rather than combat. Informal and admiring, with a playful undertone of the outfit as weaponry. Regional use: General English (clothing origin).
Origin
The anchor verifies: this is 19th-century hyperbole built on 'kill' meaning to overwhelm with one's effect. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates 'dressed to kill' to 1818, in a letter of Keats describing a performer in the burlesque Bombastes Furioso ('One chap was dressed to kill for the King in Bombastes'), and points to the adjective 'killing' in the sense 'overpowering, fascinating, attractive' from the 1630s - evidence that the devastating-impression sense of killing long predates the dress idiom. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by contrast, calls it a nineteenth-century Americanism and traces its first print appearance to Dow's Patent Sermons (around 1849), noting 'kill' meaning 'to a great or impressive degree' from the early 1800s. The two references differ only in whether the 1818 private letter or the 1849 American print counts as first; the mechanism is agreed. A claimed derivation from 'dressed to the nines' found on some idiom sites has no scholarly support.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- dress to kill
- dressed to kill and looking it
- dressing to kill
Usage Examples
- Ari arrived dressed to kill, and the whole table stopped mid-sentence.
- For the awards ceremony the band dressed to kill, sequins and all.
- He was dressed to kill for the interview, which is not the same as being qualified.