Professor Plum in the Ballroom with the candlestick.
How could there ever be anything approaching a comprehensive list when the categories are so arbitrary - for example death by being cut into half inch strips is different from death by being cut into three-quarter inch strips, and both of these are different again depending on whether the cutting implement is a laser or a pair of blunt scissors.
To while away the hours at work, a coworker and I used to take turns challenging each other to come up with a way you could be killed with the (mostly) innocuous drugstore items around us (e.g. death by Q-tip, death by nail polish, death by neosporin…)
We came up with a LOT of ideas - but nowhere near a comprehensive list.
No. Because if you suffer a massive heart attack, your brain was doing fine right up until the point of death and then stopped working afterwards.
As I wrote in my first post above, life requires the ongoing operation of a number of vital organs. If any of them stop working right it can lead to death and then all the rest will stop working because of death.
Huh? This sounds like you’re defining death as “when the heart stops,” rather than “when the brain is dead,” which I think is more common. After all, if you have a massive heart atack that stops the heart immediately, you’re still conscious for ten or fifteen seconds, and still revivable if the heart starts beating again for five minutes or more after that; if the person was somehow hooked up to a new heart or some kind of heart replacement during that time period, they’d survive. Surely death can’t be defined in such a way that the person can still be conscious after it occurs.
I think Shamozzle’s definition works, though you could probably simplify it and say “Death occurs when the brain is irreparably damaged,” whether that damage comes by sudden impact with the sidewalk at a hundred miles an hour or because the neurons are dying from lack of blood.
What I’m getting at is that, ultimately, death is caused by the conditions I mentioned previously. So by your example, one does not die when their heart stops working. One dies when pressurized, oxygenated blood fails to reach the brain. Remove the O/P blood (or compromise the brain’s physical structure) and you have death.
It seems to me that whatever the initial cause, whether it be poisoning, gunshot, kidney failure, or heart attack, all causes lead to the ultimate condition I’ve described.
Actually, if we use Information Theoretic Death as our definition, it seems that the ultimate cause of all death is autolysis.
Information theoretical death! That’s the phrase I was trying to recall. Thanks Shamozzle.
Your first item is “being burned alive” yet you don’t mention freezing to death.
Or being buried alive.
Trivial Pursuit cards are known for errors, but on one question they state that every death has the same cause- lack of oxygen to the brain.
I’m a big fan of death by exanguination.
Messy ! 
Cartooniverse
You also left out sepsis which is a major cause of death.
Note to self: Never, ever, ever, get on Ernst Stavro Mangetout’s bad side.
What about a pointed stick?
How about drowning in a vat of sulphuric acid?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/baycitynews/archive/2007/09/23/drown23.DTL&tsp=1
That was a bizarre movie.
Rather an arbitrary cutoff, there. Based on the absolutes given in the definition at that Wiki link, the only possible cause of information-theoretic death would be falling into a black hole, and maybe not even that. You can’t just destroy information.
Information is indestructible?
I remember that question. I thought the answer they gave was heart failure?
Isn’t a suicide just a specific form of homicide? It’s just a matter of who the victim is (in this case, the murderer him/her self).
Zev Steinhardt
Not as I’ve ever seen it defined. It’s always one human killing another.