the.com/grim reaper

means A personification of death as a hooded, skeletal figure carrying a scythe, used to represent mortality coming to collect.

from The 'reaper' half comes from farming — death as a harvester cutting down lives the way a farmer cuts down grain, an image that goes back to ancient and biblical traditions of death as a scythe-wielding figure. 'Grim' simply means fierce or forbidding, attached to intensify the picture. The fully personified, hooded skeleton-with-a-scythe look most people picture is largely a product of later folklore and art, especially medieval European depictions of death born from plague-era obsession with mortality, refined over centuries into the pop-culture icon we know today.