Q: I’m seeing “unalive” more and more online. I cannot recall ever hearing or seeing it before. Being a librarian, I searched and found it first in print in 1828 by Leigh Hunt. So apparently it isn’t new. I even rewatched Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch. No joy there. So what’s the story?
A: You’re probably seeing the use of “unalive” as a verb meaning to kill, a usage that first appeared about a dozen years ago.
However, the word “unalive” has been used for more than 200 years as an adjective meaning unmoved or unaffected.
The earliest use we’ve found is from The Caledonian Parnassus; a Museum of Original Scottish Songs (1812), by Willison Glass, who uses “unalive” in the untouched sense.
In his preface, the author doubts that “any reader of taste will rise from the perusal of even these short lucubrations, unalive to the measured melody of their versification, unaffected by the thoughts which they either disclose or suggest, or unprepared to acknowledge the discrimination and taste which appear in the execution.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense as “not fully susceptible or awake to something.” The dictionary’s first citation is the one you found, from Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828), by the poet and literary critic Leigh Hunt.
In that example, Hunt describes a passage in Shelley’s Scenes From the Faust of Goethe, Part 2 (1822) as a criticism of “dry, mechanical theorists, unalive to sentiment and fancy.”
(Those two early uses are the counterparts of “alive to,” meaning “aware or conscious of,” a usage the OED dates back to 1592.)
In the early 20th century, the dictionary says, the adjective “unalive” also took on the sense of “lacking in vitality; not living,” used literally at first and figuratively later.
The first literal citation is from a letter dated April 14, 1905, by the Scottish biblical scholar Marcus Dods: “How you can think yourself empty and unalive I don’t know” (from Later Letters of Marcus Dods, 1911).
The earliest figurative example is from Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The House in Paris (1935): “The street reflected the blind windows and a strip of unalive wet sky.”
In recent years, “unalive” has come to be used as a verb meaning to kill someone or oneself. But the OED, an etymological dictionary, doesn’t yet include that sense, and only one standard dictionary has recognized it so far.
Dictionary.com describes the verb as slang meaning “to kill (oneself or another person)” and has these two examples:
“The point of the game is to unalive all enemies before losing your last life token” … “Is it a cry for help when people on social media talk about unaliving themselves?”
The dictionary explains that the recent senses “are euphemisms to avoid censorship on the internet.” In its slang section, the dictionary adds that the term “is typically used as a way of circumventing social media platform rules that prohibit, remove, censor, or demonetize content that explicitly mentions killing or suicide.”
However, the earliest example we’ve seen for “unalive” used in the sense of to kill someone or oneself appeared first on cable television, and thus wasn’t originally an attempt to outwit the rules on social media.
As far as we can tell the verb first appeared in 2013 in Ultimate Spider-Man, an animated TV series on the cable network Disney XD, based on Marvel’s Spider-Man comics. In season two, episode 13, Deadpool tells Spidey that he wants to “unalive” Taskmaster:
Deadpool: We go into that compound, find Agent MacGuffin, snag the list, then unalive Taskmaster and his acolytes, capeesh?
Spider-Man: Wait, unalive them?
Deadpool: Yeah, yeah. Here’s the thing, I can’t really say the k-word out loud. It’s a weird mental tick. But we’re gonna destroy them, make them disappear, sleep them with the fishes. We’ll k-word them.
The term soon began appearing in online memes referring to the episode and in Marvel’s Deadpool comics. In early 2021, “unalive” began showing up as a verb on TikTok and the usage later spread to Instagram and other social media. Here are a few early TikTok sightings (we’ll omit the usernames):
“this is so embarrassing i just want 2 unalive myself” (Jan. 10, 2021) … “I would just write lol back if he was writing he would unalive” (April 20, 2021) … “someone unalive me” (May 28, 2021) … “What does ‘having a plan to unalive yourself’ mean?” (Oct. 19, 2021).
And here’s an Instagram example: “when shakespeare says ‘to be or not to be’ it’s peak literature but when I say to unalive or not to unalive suddenly I am ‘not well’ and need ‘therapy’ ” (Feb. 15, 2022).
“Unalive” was so prevalent on social media that the American Dialect Society selected the word as its 2021 Euphemism of the Year. The ADS defined it as a “term used as a substitute for ‘suicide’ or ‘kill’ to avoid social media filters.”
The use of euphemisms to evade censorship on social media is sometimes referred to as “algospeak.” However, “unalive” has evolved and is now also used offline, primarily by young people who are uncomfortable speaking about death, according to the linguist Adam Aleksic.
“The function of ‘unalive’ has superseded its initial algospeak origins,” he told CNN (Aug. 17, 2024). “At this point, the kids using it in middle schools aren’t using it to avoid being banned. It’s really taken on a life of its own as a way for kids to feel comfortable expressing topics about death.”
Aleksic, known online as the Etymology Nerd, told CBC, the Canadian public broadcasting network (Aug. 11, 2024) that he had “talked to middle school teachers, where the kids are submitting essays on Hamlet unaliving himself.”
And the usage isn’t limited to young people. In a 2024 exhibit about the rock band Nirvana at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, a placard said Kurt Cobain, the band’s founder, lead singer and guitarist, had “un-alived himself” rather than “killed himself” or “committed suicide.” (The museum hasn’t responded to a request for a comment.)
Speaking of euphemisms, here’s the script of the “Dead Parrot” sketch in The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words (Vol 1, 1989), by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin:
“It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.”
And finally here’s a video of the sketch, written by Cleese and Chapman, and performed with a few ad libs by Cleese and Palin in 1969.
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