as in to poison
to lower in character, dignity, or quality
such shameless ambulance chasing cankers the legal profession
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
as in rot
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Example Sentences
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Recent Examples of canker
Tim Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 1 Aug. 2019
Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 1 May 2025
The oldest stems, however, are also struggling, given they are affected by sooty bark canker, leaf spot and conk fungal disease.
—John Yoo and John Shu, Newsweek, 24 Jan. 2025
See All Example Sentences for canker
Verb
Start by removing all blighted twigs and cankered branches 6 to 10 inches below the edge of visible infection.
—Tim Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 1 Aug. 2019
Noun
Symptoms include brown-ringed leaf spots, dark stem cankers or zones of dead/dying tissue, and eventually, the collapse of plants in entire sections of a mass grouping.
—Miri Talabac, Baltimore Sun, 1 May 2025
The oldest stems, however, are also struggling, given they are affected by sooty bark canker, leaf spot and conk fungal disease.
—John Yoo and John Shu, Newsweek, 24 Jan. 2025
See All Example Sentences for canker
Recent Examples of Synonyms for canker
Verb
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The Brit List script, which treads the line between black comedy and drama, is set in the early 20th Century Hungary where a village knitting club takes it upon themselves to poison their abusive husbands with arsenic.—
Diana Lodderhose,
Deadline,
6 Nov. 2025
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People who are rude or unaware with receptionists can poison your culture, create unnecessary hierarchies, and drive your best people to leave.—
Jessica Neal,
CNBC,
5 Nov. 2025
Noun
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In 2025, protesters were not just rejecting oligarchic rot, but also reaffirming their long-standing frustration over India’s role in sustaining it.—
MUHIB RAHMAN,
Foreign Affairs,
12 Nov. 2025
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Where Tom is the satirical end point of corporate America’s moral rot, Guiteau is like his spiritual predecessor, a 19th-century American striver so intoxicated by the promise of self-making that rejection feels like cosmic betrayal.—
Nicholas Quah,
Vulture,
7 Nov. 2025
Verb
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But Strummer always had a puritanical zeal about his punk mission and a terror of getting corrupted by fame.—
Rob Sheffield,
Rolling Stone,
9 Nov. 2025
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Elites stirred up a now familiar moral panic about commerce corrupting letters and mocked Grub Street even as its writers built the first modern freelance economy and mass-print culture.—
Deni Ellis Béchard,
Scientific American,
8 Nov. 2025
Noun
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Keep the mulch at least two inches away from woody stems to prevent decay and disease.—
Mary Marlowe Leverette,
Southern Living,
8 Nov. 2025
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The Tyranids represent man's fear of the natural world, nature's inexorable ability to overwhelm, decay, and devour all of man's greatest works.—
Alan Bradley,
Space.com,
8 Nov. 2025
Verb
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Mirrors have poor reflectivity and degrade fast, while normal lenses absorb XUV light and stretch the attosecond pulses, blurring their precision.—
Neetika Walter,
Interesting Engineering,
5 Nov. 2025
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Wallin points out that half of the world’s GDP, amounting to $44 trillion, is directly dependent on nature, yet the essential systems that support economic stability continue to be degraded.—
Nia Bowers,
USA Today,
3 Nov. 2025
Noun
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On Friday night, the 43-year-old singer paused her concert at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace to help a couple get engaged during her first full performance since Blackstock's passing in August at the age of 48 from skin cancer.—
Ashley Hume,
FOXNews.com,
10 Nov. 2025
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What seemed like lingering cold symptoms turned out to be Stage 4 EGFR-positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) — an advanced form of lung cancer that has spread to other parts of the body, which is noncurable, but treatable.—
Meredith Wilshere,
PEOPLE,
9 Nov. 2025
Verb
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Residents should also remain alert to rapidly changing forecasts, as conditions may deteriorate quickly.—
Amanda Greenwood,
MSNBC Newsweek,
6 Nov. 2025
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Grace appears dazed when others pick up on her ache, and takes a perverse pleasure in Jackson’s struggle to deal with her deteriorating mental health.—
Shirley Li,
The Atlantic,
6 Nov. 2025
Noun
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Within the mud, squalor and sickness of the contraband camps, so too came the casting away of the former body and an emergence of a fuller kind of selfhood.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
17 Oct. 2025
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But even past that, Tactics is directly about how the rich and powerful view the poor and weak as almost subhuman, practically delighting in the squalor and suffering normal people go through.—
Hayes Madsen,
Rolling Stone,
24 Sep. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Canker.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/canker. Accessed 12 Nov. 2025.
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