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Picture yourself serenely succumbing to sleep. Chances are that in the mental image you’ve just formed, you are in a recumbent position—that is, lying down. The position is baked into the etymology: both succumb and recumbent trace back to cumbere, a Latin verb meaning “to lie down.” While recumbency is typically literal, succumbing is about figuratively lying down before something—yielding to it, ceasing to resist it. The word is most often used with regard to faults and foibles and demise—people succumb to temptation, plants succumb to blight—but the word can be applied in happier contexts too, as when one succumbs to sleep in a quiet spot on a sunny afternoon.
Examples of succumb in a Sentence
Colin Thubron, New York Times Book Review, 9 Apr. 2009
Last spring, the Knight Ridder chain succumbed to pressure from its largest private investor and sold off its entire lineup of 32 papers to the McClatchy Co. for more than $4 billion.
—Eric Klinenberg, Mother Jones, March/April 2007
Yet after Paul died in 1978 and his successor John Paul I succumbed to a heart attack only 34 days into his papacy, Wojyla was so oblivious to his impending fate that he spent the first day of the new papal conclave nonchalantly browsing through a quarterly review of Marxist theory.
—David Van Biema, Time, 11 Apr. 2005
Interviews with cadets, police officers and investigators trying to crack down on crime inside Mexico City's 80,000-officer force revealed that even the most earnest cops often succumb to the temptations that are both plentiful and low risk.
—Alan Zarembo, Newsweek, 4 Dec. 2000
They will pressure you, and you must try not to succumb.
he finally succumbed and let his wife get rid of his dilapidated easy chair
Jp Mangalindan, Time, 12 Sep. 2025
More members of the FDNY have succumbed to 9/11 illness than were killed on the day of the attack.
—Nick Mordowanec, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Sep. 2025
Army Archerd of Variety shocked Hollywood in breaking the story that Rock Hudson was succumbing to AIDS.
—Peter Bart, Deadline, 11 Sep. 2025
What was weird was that this snake had raised its head and spread a hood before succumbing to the gardening implement (which was definitely not normal for Missouri).
—Popular Science Team, Popular Science, 10 Sep. 2025
See All Example Sentences for succumb
Cite this Entry
“Succumb.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/succumb. Accessed 21 Sep. 2025.
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succumb
verb
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