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cyanide

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈsaɪənaɪd//

Any compound containing the -C≡N group or the CN⁻ anion.

noun

  1. 1

    Any compound containing the -C≡N group or the CN⁻ anion.

  2. 2

    Sodium or potassium cyanide, used in the extraction of gold and silver or as a poison.

    The birdies all try an' hide / But they still go for peanuts / When coated with cyanide

    Two doctors and a metallurgist from Scotland patented a process for dissolving gold with cyanide in 1887 and patented the recovery of gold from solution using finely divided zinc (zinc precipitation) the following year. […] The first commercial processing plant to use cyanide in the milling circuit was constructed at the Crown mine at Karangahake, New Zealand in 1889.

    The vast majority of the victims, on Jones’s orders, had drunk a fruit punch mixture laced with cyanide, a deadly poison. Adults had fed the poisoned liquid to the children, including infants.

  3. 3

    Hydrogen cyanide, or cyanide gas, a poisonous gas.

Etymology

From cyan- + -ide.

verb

  1. 1

    To treat or poison with cyanide.

Forms

plural
cyanides
past tense
cyanided
past participle
cyanided
present participle
cyaniding
third person singular
cyanides
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).