Phrase guide
Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.
Sound
Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.
verb
To give someone a serious beating using one's fists; to punch someone until he or she is unconscious.
Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract
Usage: idiomatic
No example sentence was provided for this meaning.
Synonyms: none provided
Antonyms: none provided
History
Chiefly by the metaphor of extinguishing someone's lights as sources of illumination (thus putting out their lights, e.g., snuffing out their lamps, lanterns, candles, or torches), but the sense of light as sightedness or vision is cognitively adjacent, nearly setting up an interpretation of lights as referring to the eyes themselves, which close (via the eyelids) at the advent of unconsciousness; the potentially variable figurativeness behind by one's lights is comparable here.
