Old English cyssan (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kussen and German küssen.

• An action or event causing certain failure for an enterprise may be described as the kiss of death. Although the phrase is relatively recent it is thought to refer to a story in the Bible. In the biblical account of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas Iscariot identified Jesus to the soldiers who would arrest him by greeting him with a kiss. The expression is often used of apparently beneficial or well-meaning actions that somehow tempt fate, and have the opposite result to that intended. A much earlier traditional expression for an act of betrayal, a Judas kiss, refers to the same story. The last words of Lord Nelson, fatally wounded at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, are usually quoted as ‘Kiss me, Hardy’, spoken to Thomas Hardy, the captain of Nelson's ship, HMS Victory. According to eyewitness accounts he did say this, but it was not his final speech. His real last words were either ‘Drink, drink. Fan, fan. Rub, rub’, asking the doctor to give him a drink, fan him, and rub him to relieve his pain, or ‘Thank God, I have done my duty’.