make away

present singular third person makes away · participle present making away · participle past made away · past made away

1. intransitiveobsoleteTo depart, leave; to make off.
2. obsoletetransitiveTo destroy.
3. obsoletetransitiveTo kill.

   If a child were crooked or deformed in body or mind, they made him away.

   1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC

   1 more example

   By him that dide for me, I wil not dine, Till I haue ſeene thee hangd or made away.

   1593, anonymous author, The Life and Death of Iacke Straw […], →OCLC, Act III

4. obsoletetransitiveTo get rid of, dispose of.

   ‘Will you,’ said he, ‘on your honour, let me see them uncurtailed, and not offer to make them away; no, not a single paper?’

   1740, Samuel Richardson, Pamela, volume II

5. obsoletereflexiveTo kill oneself, commit suicide.

   Hostratus the friar took that book which Reuchlin had written against him, under the name of Epist. obscurorum vivorum, so to heart, that for shame and grief he made away himself.

   1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, New York: New York Review Books, published 2001, →ISBN, page 263

   1 more example

   the people impatient of so many changes of fortune, tooke such a resolution unto death, that I have heard my father say, he kept accompt of five and twentie chiefe housholders, that in one weeke made them-selves away[…].

   1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 40, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC