Sapping

noun, verb

noun, verb ·2 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The act by which something is sapped or depleted.

    "December 22, 1821, Joseph Story, Address Delivered Before the Members of the New-England Society, in Charleston [The government] may be destroyed by popular violence, or the madness of party, or the deeper sappings of corruption."

  2. 2
    The act of excavating trenches.
  3. 3
    The act of striking with a sap or club.

    "And when he had me up there he would sap me again and I wouldn't remember anything that happened in between the two sappings."

Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of sap form-of, gerund, participle, present

Synonyms

All synonyms
draindrainingexhaustingfatiguinggruelingtrying

Example

More examples

"She kept hurtful weeds from growing beneath her trees and sapping the earth-food required by her charges."

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