Kill time Informal

To spend time doing something unimportant or unproductive simply because one is waiting for something else to happen.

It’s used casually and often self-deprecatingly, acknowledging that the activity itself doesn’t really matter.

The verb “kill” has been paired with abstract nouns to mean “get rid of” or “use up” since at least the 16th century, but the phrase “kill time” itself is better documented from the 18th century than from the 17th, as popular accounts often claim. In her 1758 novel “Henrietta,” Charlotte Lennox describes an activity as “one of those happy expedients for killing time (as the fashionable phrase is)” — a parenthetical aside showing the expression was recognizable current slang at the time, current enough that she didn’t need to explain it, yet still novel enough to be worth flagging as a fashionable turn of phrase. That detail pushes back against the claim of a specifically 17th-century origin: while the broader habit of personifying time as an enemy fits the sensibility of that earlier era, the earliest solid documentary evidence points to the phrase catching on as common usage in the first half of the 18th century. Its rise reflects a shift in attitudes toward leisure and boredom that came with more structured urban and social life, where idle waiting in drawing rooms, coach stops, and antechambers became something to be actively managed rather than simply endured.

We got to the airport four hours early, so we killed time by wandering through every shop in the terminal.

She always brings a paperback to kill time on the subway.

The kids killed time before dinner by playing cards on the porch.

A: What did you do while you were waiting for the results? B: Honestly, I just killed time scrolling through my phone.