Amputate

//ˈæmpjʊteɪt// verb

verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To cut off, to prune. obsolete
  2. 2
    remove surgically wordnet
  3. 3
    To surgically remove a part of the body, especially a limb.

    "The surgeon had to amputate the patient’s leg to save his life."

Synonyms

All synonyms
cut offpruneabscindannihilateaxban

Example

More examples

"Sami decided to amputate his big toe."

Etymology

From Latin amputō (“prune, cut away”). The original sense of pruning (a tree, etc.) became obsolete. The OED considers uses related to anything other than an animal limb to be figurative uses of the modern sense.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.