Eliminate
verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level
Definitions
- 1 To completely remove, get rid of, put an end to. transitive
"The air-handling equipment humidifies, dehumidifies, and distributes the correct amount of fresh air into every zone and eliminates all smoke, dust, and odors, with electric precipitrons."
- 2 eliminate from the body wordnet
- 3 To render (a facility) unusable, to destroy it; to disable (a soldier), make them unable to fight (typically but not necessarily by killing) transitive
- 4 kill in large numbers wordnet
- 5 To kill (a person or animal). slang, transitive
"a ruthless mobster who eliminated his enemies"
Show 8 more definitions
- 6 terminate, end, or take out wordnet
- 7 To excrete (waste products). ambitransitive
"In one study, 65.8% of the cat owners relinquishing a cat thought that their cat eliminated outside the litter box or destroyed furniture to spite them."
- 8 remove (an unknown variable) from two or more equations wordnet
- 9 To exclude (from investigation or from further competition). transitive
"Bill was eliminated as a suspect when the police interviewed witnesses."
- 10 dismiss from consideration or a contest wordnet
- 11 To record amounts in a consolidation statement to remove the effects of inter-company transactions.
- 12 remove from a contest or race wordnet
- 13 get rid of something wordnet
Example
More examples"We tried to eliminate all danger beforehand."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin ēlīminātus, perfect passive participle of ēlīminō (“to turn out of doors, banish”), from ē- + līmen (“a threshold”, līmin- in compounds) + -ō (first conjugation verb-forming suffix) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), akin to Latin līmes (“a boundary”); see also English limit and limen.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.