Populate
adj, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To supply with inhabitants; to people. transitive
- 2 fill with inhabitants wordnet
- 3 To live in; to inhabit. transitive
- 4 be an inhabitant of or reside in wordnet
- 5 To increase in number; to breed. intransitive
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- 6 To fill initially empty items in a collection. ambitransitive
"John clicked the Search button and waited for the list to populate."
- 7 To fill initially empty slots or sockets on a circuit board or similar.
- 1 populous obsolete
"Now, a famous King, and ſtrengthened with a Prince of ſingular expectation, and in the prime of his years, owner of the entire Iſle of Britain, enjoying Ireland populate and quiet, and infinitely more ſupported by Confederates of the Low-Countries, Denmarke, divers of the Princes of Germany and others."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Were we to populate the corpus with unnatural sentences or inaccurate translations, this resource wouldn't be of much use, now would it?"
Etymology
Borrowed from Medieval Latin populātus, past participle of populor (“populate”), from Latin populus (“people”).
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.