Meaning
Death personified - the hooded skeleton with the scythe who harvests the living, field by field and life by life. The phrase names the figure everyone can draw from memory, and borrowing him for a sentence makes any menace feel final and rather literary. Wry-macabre register - invoked in jokes, editorials, and insurance brochures alike; capital letters preferred. Regional use: General English; late-medieval iconography, 19th-century name.
Origin
The skeleton with the scythe took shape in late medieval Europe: Death had been an animated skeleton since the Middle Ages, the Dance of Death made him a familiar figure on church walls, and the plague generations dressed him regionally - Scandinavia's plague hag Pesta carrying a rake (some survive) or a broom (all die), the Netherlands' Magere Hein acquiring scythe, robe, and bones. Behind him stand gentler and grander ancestors: Greek Thanatos, the winged son of Night and twin of Sleep, and Revelation's fourth horseman, the pale rider whose name is Death. The English name is startlingly recent: the Oxford record cited by Wiktionary gives the grim reaper a first attestation of 1847, from a translation of a German work, and the figure became widely known by that name in English literature in the late 1800s - Wodehouse could still joke in 1922 about the Reaper laying golfers a stymie on the links of life.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Death with a scythe
- meet the Grim Reaper
Usage Examples
- Radiology's grim reaper joke - the dose that finally gets you is the one you never ordered - survives every safety course.
- The actuary addressed the grim reaper directly in his retirement speech, and the room laughed carefully.
- Influenza, the city's grim reaper for three winters, was routed by the vaccine drive in one.