depopulate

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English

Etymology

From de- +‎ populate or Latin dēpopulō.

Pronunciation

Verb

depopulate (third-person singular simple present depopulates, present participle depopulating, simple past and past participle depopulated)

  1. (transitive) To reduce the population of a region by disease, war, forced relocation etc.
    • c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]:
      Where is this viper
      That would depopulate the city and
      Be every man himself?
    • 1715–1720, Homer, translated by Alexander Pope, “Book 5”, in The Iliad of Homer, volume (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott […], →OCLC, page 48, lines 681-685:
      So two young Mountain Lions, nurs’d with Blood
      In deep Recesses of the gloomy Wood,
      Rush fearless to the Plains, and uncontroul’d
      Depopulate the Stalls and waste the Fold;
    • 1748, Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV. by George Anson, Eſq; Commander in Chief of a Squadron of His Majeſty's Ships, ſent upon an Expedition to the South-Seas.‎[1], London: J. and P. Knapton, →OCLC, pages 337–338:
      There are uſually reckoned twelve of theſe Iſlands ; but it will appear, from the chart of the North part of the Pacific Ocean hereafter inſerted, that if the ſmall iſlets and rocks are counted in, then their whole number will amount to above twenty. They were formerly moſt of them well inhabited ; and, even not ſixty years ago, the three principal Iſlands, Guam, Rota, and Tinian together, are ſaid to have contained above fifty thouſand people : But ſince that time Tinian hath been entirely depopulated ; and only two or three hundred Indians have been left at Rota, to cultivate rice for the Iſland of Guam ; ſo that now no more than Guam can properly be ſaid to be inhabited. This Iſland of Guam is the only ſettlement of the Spaniards ; here they keep a governor and garriſon, and here the Manila ſhip generally touches for refreſhment, in her paſſage from Acapulco to the Philippines.
    • 2005, Tony Judt, chapter 17, in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, New York: Penguin, page 548:
      The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside.
  2. (transitive, electronics) To remove the components from a circuit board.
  3. (intransitive) To become depopulated, to lose its population.
    • 1849, William Henry Bartlett, chapter 1, in The Nile Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt‎[2], London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co, page 29:
      […] the country […] has been rapidly depopulating, and utterly draining of its vital resources, till the unhappy population have sunk to the lowest depth of misery.
    • 1917, Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems of François Villon‎[3], Boston: John W. Luce, Critical Biography, page 1:
      […] on the 2d of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into disaffected and depopulating Paris.
    • 1994, Kenneth Coward, The Welfare: A Concise Archival History of Social Services‎[4], Owen Sound, Ontario, Appendix III, p. 56:
      Rural Canada was depopulating and immigrants were needed.
    • 2008, Gary Presley, chapter 15, in Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio‎[5], Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, page 80:
      Visitors dwindled over time. […] My world shrank as it depopulated. It became my room, the front room, and the kitchen.

Translations

See also

Adjective

depopulate (not comparable)

  1. (obsolete) Depopulated.
    • 1548, Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke‎[6], London: Richard Grafton, The firste yere of The vnquiete tyme of Kyng Henry the fourthe, page xix:
      A world it was to see […] his daily peregrinacion in the desert, felles and craggy mountains of that bareine vnfertile and depopulate countrey.
    • c. 1611, George Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets‎[7], London: Nathaniell Butter, Book Two, p. 30:
      Wroth for bright-cheekt Bryseis losse; whom from Lyrnessus spoiles,
      (His owne exploit) he brought away, as trophee of his toiles,
      When that town was depopulate;

Latin

Verb

dēpopulāte

  1. second-person plural present active imperative of dēpopulō
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