Englishbite the dust
Meaning: To be destroyed or ruined beyond repair; slang for "to die".
Example: “Another neighborhood bookstore bit the dust this year.”
Equivalents in other languages
Spanish: morder el polvo Literally: To bite the dust
French: Mordre la poussière Literally: To bite the dust
Origin: The image is a fallen body lying so flat against the ground that its mouth meets the dirt, and it is old: Homer describes Hector's dead companions lying with "the earth in their teeth," and the Bible has a related "lick the dust" in Psalm 72. The specific wording "bite the dust" is on record from 1750, in Tobias Smollett's translation of The Adventures of Gil Blas — "we made two of them bite the dust" — describing men killed in a fight. American Western films of the 1930s, with cowboys and Native characters thrown from horses onto dusty ground, popularized the phrase for a new audience two centuries later, but did not originate it.
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