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eradicate

verbverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//əˈræd.əˌkeɪt//
  • United States//iˈræd.əˌkeɪt//
  • //ɪˈɹæd.ɪ.keɪt//

To destroy completely; to reduce to nothing radically; to put an end to.

verb

  1. 1

    archaicTo pull up by the roots.

  2. 2

    To destroy completely; to reduce to nothing radically; to put an end to.

    Near-synonyms: delete, erase

    Smallpox was globally eradicated in 1980.

    I would like to know if there are any true moralists who would like to correspond with someone who just instinctively feels there's something wrong somewhere in this unbenevolent world and wants to save it by culminating love and eradicating the captive emotions of the self (Ego).

    Thus far, virtually every cinematic attempt to convey the outrages of South African life under apartheid has been diminished by its own good intentions and by a grim sameness that eradicates any element of surprise.

Etymology

PIE word *wréh₂ds From Middle English eradicaten (“to eradicate”), from eradicat(e) (“eradicated”, past participle of eradicaten) + -en (verb-forming suffix), borrowed from Latin ērādīcātus, the perfect passive participle of ērādīcō (“to uproot, root out; to anihilate, eradicate”), from ē- (“out”) + rādīx (“root”) + -ō (verb-forming suffix). See also radish.

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteeradicated

Etymology

From Middle English eradicat(e) (“eradicated”, past participle of eradicaten), used up until Early Modern English, see -ate (adjective-forming suffix) and Etymology 1 for more.

Forms

past tense
eradicated
past participle
eradicated
present participle
eradicating
third person singular
eradicates
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).