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Depopulate   Listen
verb
Depopulate  v. t.  (past & past part. depopulated; pres. part. depopulating)  To deprive of inhabitants, whether by death or by expulsion; to reduce greatly the populousness of; to dispeople; to unpeople. "Where is this viper, That would depopulate the city?" Note: It is not synonymous with laying waste or destroying, being limited to the loss of inhabitants; as, an army or a famine may depopulate a country. It rarely expresses an entire loss of inhabitants, but often a great diminution of their numbers; as, the deluge depopulated the earth.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Depopulate" Quotes from Famous Books



... sufferers or as agents. I was present from first to last, and watched the whole course of the mysterious storm which fell upon our devoted city in a strength like that of a West Indian hurricane, and which did seriously threaten at one time to depopulate our university, through the dark suspicions which settled upon its members, and the natural reaction of generous indignation in repelling them; while the city in its more stationary and native classes would very soon have manifested THEIR awful sense of things, of the hideous insecurity ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... more than he can hold." Every man gets about the same satisfaction out of life. Mr. Suddlechops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alexander at the head of his legions. The business of the one is to depopulate kingdoms, the business of the other to reap beards seven days old; but their relative positions do not affect the question. The one works with razors and soap-lather the other with battle-cries and well-greaved Greeks. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... bottom of their burrow. Probably it would be most interested in the babies, and undoubtedly would destroy every one within a few moments. All the weasel family, to which the polecat belongs, kill for the pure joy of killing, and in China one such animal will entirely depopulate a hen-roost in a ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... incomparably more happy than mine. For you died rather of age than any violent illness, and left the Florentines in a state of peace and prosperity procured for them by your counsels. But I died of the plague, after having seen it almost depopulate Athens, and left my country engaged in a most dangerous war, to which my advice and the power of my eloquence had excited the people. The misfortune of the pestilence, with the inconveniences they suffered on account of the war, so irritated their minds, that ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton

... king interrupted her, "I'll send every man to the Tower that wants to marry you, if I depopulate the court." ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... had been formerly composed against Marcus Aurelius (the philosophic emperor!) who was equally generous of hecatombs: "To Marcus Caesar from the white oxen. It will be all over with us if you come back a conqueror." People said that Julian, on his return, would depopulate stables ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... ignoble occupation of looking on; whereas two out of three of them, were this spectacle not provided, would far more likely be attending a horse-race, or betting in clubs and public-houses. The bricklayer, the stockbroker, the archdeacon, by going to see Lockwood bowl, depopulate no village green. You judge these persons by yourself, and tell yourself reproachfully that but for this attraction you, John Verinder, would be creditably perspiring at a practice-net in Tooting or Dulwich; whereas, the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... bottom, and captured many; few escaped, and those were damaged. This filled that country with such fear that their precautions [against him] wrought more destruction than his cruelty could have accomplished; for these obliged the king of China to depopulate the extensive coasts of his entire kingdom, a strip of land six leguas wide embracing cities of 100,000 or 200,000 inhabitants, in order that they might not be the prey of the conqueror. [57] This was a measure tending to the latter's prosperity; for all those many people, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various

... and his ministers had no solidity, and was crumbling away even before the death of its founder: while the great plague, beginning in the fifteenth year of Justinian, continued for no less than fifty-two years to ravage every province of the empire and depopulate whole cities and provinces. In such a period as this the fragile and exotic poetry of the Byzantine Renaissance could not sustain itself. Political and theological epigrams continued to be written in profusion; but the collections may be searched through in vain for a single touch of imagination ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... of the Atlantic coast. But more liberal counsels prevailed. In the first debates upon the public lands, also, it was clearly stated that the social system of the nation was involved quite as much as the question of revenue. Eastern fears that cheap lands in abundance would depopulate the Atlantic States and check their industrial growth by a scarcity of labor supply were met by the answer of one of ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... are the real causes of public misfortunes. Useless, unjust Wars depopulate the earth. Encroaching and despotic Governments absorb the benefits of nature. The rapacity of Courts discourages agriculture, extinguishes industry, produces want, pestilence and misery. Heaven ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... to this question is an answer which everybody knows and nobody likes to give. What is driving our ministers of religion and statesmen to blurt it out at last is the plain fact that marriage is now beginning to depopulate the country with such alarming rapidity that we are forced to throw aside our modesty like people who, awakened by an alarm of fire, rush into the streets in their nightdresses or in no dresses at all. The fictitious ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... are prodigiously fond of FIGURING, but of doing nothing else. Give them a slate and pencil, and in fifteen minutes they will clear the continent of every black skin; and, if desired, throw in the Indians to boot. While they depopulate America, they find not the least difficulty in providing for the wants of the emigrating myriads to the coast of Africa: we have ships enough, and, notwithstanding the hardness of the times, money enough. O, the surpassing utility of the arithmetic! it ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... productions you will exchange for the provisions which you require.... On a good soil, if you are short of inhabitants, give all your attention to agriculture, which multiplies men, and banish the arts, which only serve to depopulate the country.... Pay attention to extensive and convenient coasts. Cover the sea with vessels, and you will have a brilliant and short existence. If your seas wash only inaccessible rocks, let the people be barbarous, ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat

... were desirous of separating themselves from their wives, in order to embrace the religious state, and many married women were anxious to shut themselves up in cloisters; but the holy Patriarch, not wishing to break up well-assorted marriages, nor to depopulate the country, advised them to serve God in their own houses, and promised to give them a rule by which they might progress in virtue and live as religious, without practising the austerities of that state ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... to bring about unity by suppressing variety. The state ought not only to respect the objective and generic, but also the subjective and specific in individuals; and while diffusing the unseen world of morals, it must not depopulate the kingdom of appearance, the external ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... life and property is very common in this region, and the knowledge of it made our hopes beat high for the success of a peaceful Mission on the shores of the Lake. The rate, however, in which the people here will perish by the next famine, or be exported by Juma and others, will, we fear, depopulate those parts which we have just described as crowded with people. Hunger will ere long compel them to sell each other. An intelligent man complained to us of the Arabs often seizing slaves, to whom ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... the Americas fought against him with every resource at their command, could depopulate half the Western World. Kleig looked ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various



Words linked to "Depopulate" :   reduce, depopulation, desolate



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