Knowledge Bank

The purpose of this study was to investigate the uses of die/dead in English and compare them with shinu in Japanese. In English and Japanese, the term die/dead is often used to describe a situation when an electronic device either runs out of battery or breaks. However, the interpretations of die/dead and shinu can be different depending on the context. For instance, keetai shinde(i)ru (‘a cellphone is dead’) can mean that it has a slow connection in Japanese, which is usually not expressed in English. To find out how die/dead is used to describe the situations of devices in English, the online corpus tool Sketch Engine was employed to obtain data from the web as well as X as a supplemental source. This data was analyzed on the intended meaning of die/dead. The results showed that the terms were used with three different meanings: out of charge, broken, and state of losing popularity in our data.