Deforestation

noun

noun ·5 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The process of destroying a forest and replacing it with something else, especially with an agricultural system. countable, uncountable

    "Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands."

  2. 2
    the removal of trees wordnet
  3. 3
    A transformation to eliminate intermediate data structures within a program. countable, uncountable
  4. 4
    the state of being clear of trees wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
disforestation

Example

More examples

"A biodiversity sanctuary in Brazil called The Pantanal is threatened by deforestation."

Etymology

From deforest + -ation. First attested in 1870.

Related phrases

data structure

More for "deforestation"

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