means The act or state of being deprived of air — dying or struggling to breathe because oxygen can't get in or carbon dioxide can't get out.

from From Latin 'suffocare,' to choke or stifle, built from 'sub-' (under) and 'fauces' — the throat, the gullet, that narrow passage of the windpipe. So the literal sense is something pressing 'under the throat,' a squeezing from below. The same 'fauces' gives us the anatomical word for the back of the mouth, and the verb arrived in English through French in the late 16th century.