has died down/ died down and find a word

1.From cnn news:

Relentless winds that spread 3 huge wild fires in Southern California have finally died down. Fire crew say the biggest fire, the Porter Ranch blaze is 50 percent contained. They believed a downed power line started that fire. All the evacuation orders were lifted yesterday.

2.From a web site:

Even before the removal, violence broke out in the streets of Tallinn. Rioters smashed shop windows, flipped over cars, and threw rocks at riot police. Most of the demonstrators were ethnic Russians, who make up a quarter of the nation's population. But the fighting died down quickly; hundreds of people were arrested, the windows were repaired, and street sweepers had cleaned up everything by the morning of April 28.
www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia?currentPage=all

Hi teacher, I have two questions:

1.Die down means decrease or gradually quieter. And in the first example, the fire has gradually deceased, but still remained there. But do you think "died down" as a past tense has a sense of "totally stop" in the second example?

2.Also, Instead of "died out" ,which words/terms/adj are good to describe Hurricane "weaken" ? If my memory serves me right, I came across a description like the hurricane lost its stem/stream in CNN news, but I googled it but in vain.

1. In the second example, there still could have been isolated individuals who continued their protest, so it may not have stopped completely, but it got a lot quieter.

Died down certainly means "got less intense" but I don't know that it requires the meaning that it happened gradually.

The sounds of the orchestra tuning their instruments died down quickly when the conductor stepped on stage.

2. You are looking for "lost steam." Old trains engines uses steam power to move. If the engine lost its head of steam, it didn't have any power and couldn't go anywhere. Now we say something is "losing steam" when it's slowing down.

{not a teacher}

:up: Amen to Barb's answer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by redgiant

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Hi teacher, I have two questions:

1.Die down means decrease or gradually quieter. And in the first example, the fire has gradually deceased*, but still remained there. But do you think "died down" as a past tense has a sense of "totally stop" in the second example?

2.Also, Instead of "died out" ,which words/terms/adj are good to describe Hurricane "weaken" ? If my memory serves me right, I came across a description like the hurricane lost its stem/stream in CNN news, but I googled it but in vain.

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* Is this a typo? If it had deceased it would have died out (completely). But the word 'deceased' is usually applied to animals (particularly humans) rather than fires.

Further on the subject of your Q2: the word 'abate' is used quite often for fires, storms, and winds (in Br English, at least). If a hurricane has died down it can be said to have 'spent its force'; if it has died out, there is the (quite informal) expression 'fizzled out'. For general weakening there is the very academic word 'attenuate'. And for a trial you can have 'mitigating circumstances' (but I've never heard 'mitigate' used in the context of a hurricane).


b