to die for
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
extremely desirable or appealing
Literally: to die in exchange for something
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
The Mandela Theatre Company from Edinburgh visiting on April 29 intends to develop the play The Dorm for school benefit and has great follow up potential.
There are women who have silver hair to die for, great metallic masses of it.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “to die for” mean?
extremely desirable or appealing Literally: to die in exchange for something
Is “to die for” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.