verb ·2 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb

1. 1
   To cancel funding for. US, transitive

   "Did the Arizona legislators satisfy the principles of deliberation when they decided to defund organ transplants?"

Synonyms

All synonyms

unfund

Example

More examples

"There have been calls to defund the police for years now."

Etymology

From de- + fund.

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