sb. (a.) [f. KILL v. + DEVIL.]
† 1. A recklessly daring fellow. Obs.
c. 1590. Marlowe, Faust., iv. ‘Did ye see yonder tall fellow…? he has killed the devil.’ So I should be called Kill-devil all the parish over.
2. A West Indian name for rum. ? Obs.
Hence prob. F. guildive (1722: ‘origine inconnue,’ Littré and Hatz.-Darm.). N. Darnell Davis in Trans. Philol. Soc., 1885–7, 714.
c. 1651. in N. D. Davis, Cavaliers & Roundheads in Barbados (1887), 112. The chiefe fudling they make in the Island is Rumbullion, alias Kill-Devill, and this is made of suggar canes distilled, a hott, hellish and terrible liquor.
1654. Connect. Col. Rec. (1850), I. 255. Berbados Liquors, commonly called Rum, Kill Deuill, or the like.
1740. Hist. Jamaica, II. 31. Rum-punch is not improperly called Kill-devil; for Thousands lose their Lives by its means.
1796. Stedman, Surinam, I. 96. The furnace which distils the kill-devil.
3. An artificial bait used in angling, made to spin in the water like a wounded fish.
1833. Bowlker’s Art Angling, 33. There are … three modes of Trolling…. The third is called the kill-devil, and … it answers I think the best of all.
1839. Col. Hawker, Diary (1893), II. 161. Lord Saltoun’s brass ‘Kill-devil,’ the only artificial bait that I ever found to take in our river.
1860. C. Simeon, Stray Notes Fishing, 22. I have fished with artificial spinning-baits (killdevils) of nearly every kind.
B. adj. That would kill devils; deadly.
1831. Trelawney, Adv. of a Younger Son, III. xxxvi. 252. We distributed this kill-devil hell-paste in several parts of the vessel,… destroying ‘at one fell swoop,’ all the reptiles which infested and annoyed us.
