Meaning
Dead and buried - the standard grave-depth turned into a euphemism. The phrase manages to be blunt and indirect at once: it states the burial quite literally while meaning, simply and finally, that someone is gone for good. Euphemistic but hard-boiled register - obituaries by way of noir; the plague-depth story is folklore and is not claimed here. Regional use: General English; American origin.
Origin
An American shortening of buried six feet under ground, first recorded in 1924, on the traditional depth to which graves were dug - a depth more customary and regulatory than universal, since actual grave depths vary. The much-repeated story that the six-foot rule dates from plague-time London, grave-diggers ordered to bury deep lest infection rise, belongs to folklore rather than record; what the record shows is the phrase arriving whole in the United States in the twentieth century and spreading fast, helped along by a hit HBO series that borrowed it for a funeral-home family. Wiktionary's gloss is the settled one - buried underground; not alive; dead - with six feet deep as its twin, and the phrase now does daily duty from obituaries to gangster films.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be six feet under
- buried six feet under
- six feet deep
Usage Examples
- Everyone who crossed the Morales brothers before 1931 is now six feet under, the guide explained brightly.
- The old road's dead-and-buried tolls came back as a joke: six feet under the new bypass.
- He promised the savings would appear or he would end up six feet under, whichever the auditors preferred.