exterminate
verb
Did you know?
Originally, to exterminate something was to banish it or drive it away. And it is this meaning that can be found in the Latin origin of "exterminate." "Exterminate" comes from "exterminatus," the past participle of exterminare, meaning "to drive beyond the boundaries." The Latin word exterminare was formed from the prefix ex- ("out of" or "outside") and "terminus" ("boundary"). Not much more than a century after its introduction to English, "exterminate" came to denote destroying or utterly putting an end to something. And that's the use with which the word is usually employed today.
Examples of exterminate in a Sentence
Art Jipson, The Conversation, 11 June 2025
The German occupiers, however, acted with barbaric brutality, exterminating local Jewish populations and starving to death approximately two million Soviet prisoners of war by March 1942.
—Foreign Affairs, 25 Feb. 2025
That train station trauma was the first of countless indignities, and worse, that Mr. Lev and his family experienced as they were swept into the gathering storm of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, which Israel marked Thursday, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
—Dina Kraft, Christian Science Monitor, 24 Apr. 2025
Nobody loathes the creatures more than Dafoe’s Maxim, who blames them for his wife’s death and assembles an army of young boys to exterminate the magical beings from the Carpathian forests.
—Christian Zilko, IndieWire, 17 Apr. 2025
See All Example Sentences for exterminate
Cite this Entry
“Exterminate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exterminate. Accessed 2 Jul. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
exterminate
verb
Share