I found the following sentence on sentencedict.com web site at Die off in a sentence (esp. good sentence like quote, proverb...)
"The reindeer herds are slowly dying off."
On wordreference.com, I found the entry of "die-off" as a noun at die-off - WordReference.com Dictionary of English:
n. 1.a sudden, natural perishing of large numbers of a species, population, or community.
My question is:
Why the noun form of "die-off" carries the sense of "sudden" while its verb form could have the meaning of "slowly" (which is quite opposite to "sudden") in the above sentence?
"The reindeer herds are slowly dying off."
On wordreference.com, I found the entry of "die-off" as a noun at die-off - WordReference.com Dictionary of English:
n. 1.a sudden, natural perishing of large numbers of a species, population, or community.
My question is:
Why the noun form of "die-off" carries the sense of "sudden" while its verb form could have the meaning of "slowly" (which is quite opposite to "sudden") in the above sentence?