BANE

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does bane mean? 

• BANE (noun)
  The noun BANE has 1 sense:

1. something causing misery or death

  Familiarity information: BANE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BANE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Something causing misery or death

Classified under:

Nouns denoting stable states of affairs

Synonyms:

bane; curse; nemesis; scourge

Context example:

the bane of my life

Hypernyms ("bane" is a kind of...):

affliction (a cause of great suffering and distress)

 Context examples 

Enterococci bacteria are the bane of hospitals, causing thousands of multidrug-resistant infections in patients each year.

(Enterococci may have evolved antimicrobial resistance millions of years ago, NIH)

But the bane of his life was Lip-lip.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

We have shaken off some of that horrible insect life which is the bane of tropical travel.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Alas! it was this sister, this friend and companion, who was now the chief bane of Fanny's comfort.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Only one thing, I know: you said you were not as good as you should like to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection;—one thing I can comprehend: you intimated that to have a sullied memory was a perpetual bane.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

They were presided over nominally by my mother, but really by Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who were always present, and found them a favourable occasion for giving my mother lessons in that miscalled firmness, which was the bane of both our lives.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)