Slain is a correct and usable word in written English.
It is usually used as a past participle verb, meaning "killed" or "defeated". For example, "The brave warrior was slain in the battle."
It's a world the fortune-teller knows well: over the years, she said she had often used her gift to help local people – locating a lost kilo of opium paste or comforting the girlfriends of slain traffickers.
The unbearable difference, of course, is that while the minotaur can be slain, Lucinda's cancer can't: The first was dispatched by a trick with a ball of string the second cannot be reached by medical science.
Despite being behind the restitution of the grandchildren of so many of her fellow grandmothers, the white-haired, softly spoken woman who had endeared herself as a perennial hopeful for a Nobel Peace Prize for Argentina, and a worldwide symbol of peaceful women's activism, had not yet been able to find her own slain daughter's son.
From Nigeria (see article) to Pakistan, the month that saw 17 slain in Paris saw hundreds more killed elsewhere (see chart).In many minds IS has now overtaken al-Qaeda as the most notorious current exponents of jihadism.
In the chaos that followed, a man on trial in a courthouse nearby for allegedly collaborating with Israel in the assassination of three Hamas activists, was himself killed by relatives of the slain men.
American evangelists draw huge crowds in Kenya, for example, and thrill them with lucrative displays of "faith healing .Your correspondent was not asked to heal the sick, but he was told to perform the last rites on one of those Congolese rebels' slain comrades.
In parliament no senator would lead a prayer to commemorate the slain politician.
Kennedy's language was colder and less colourful, but he was just as rude about the Texan who had succeeded his slain brother as president of the United States.
Critics say the bill could spell a return to abuses at the height of the PKK insurgency in the 1990s, when hundreds of writers were imprisoned, thousands of detainees were tortured and many were slain in extra-judicial killings by security forces.These measures call into question as never before Turkey's commitment to the reforms that helped it to start EU membership talks last October.
From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God's name; and money and volunteers have poured into these regions.
The Israeli army says Mr Qawasmeh was slain resisting arrest; Palestinian eyewitnesses say it was an assassination.
