as in to eradicate
to destroy all traces of
in a stroke, the March snowstorm obliterated our hopes for an early spring
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Recent Examples of obliterate
Like Romero’s foundational film and its sequels, 28 Days Later held a mirror up to society and asked what Britain would look like when its traditional values were obliterated and the notions of polite society were snuffed out.
—
Richard Newby, HollywoodReporter, 23 June 2025
Smith will obliterate that benchmark before the All-Star break.
—Chandler Rome, New York Times, 20 June 2025
Video stores, as Perry points out, thrived as independent businesses in the eighties, were dominated by Blockbuster and other chains in the nineties, lost ground to big-box-store DVD sales in the two-thousands, and were just about obliterated by streaming services by the early twenty-tens.
—Richard Brody, New Yorker, 10 June 2025
Images show deep muddy scars carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees obliterated.
—Laura Paddison, CNN Money, 7 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for obliterate
Richard Newby, HollywoodReporter, 23 June 2025
Smith will obliterate that benchmark before the All-Star break.
—Chandler Rome, New York Times, 20 June 2025
Video stores, as Perry points out, thrived as independent businesses in the eighties, were dominated by Blockbuster and other chains in the nineties, lost ground to big-box-store DVD sales in the two-thousands, and were just about obliterated by streaming services by the early twenty-tens.
—Richard Brody, New Yorker, 10 June 2025
Images show deep muddy scars carved into the mountain, with buildings and trees obliterated.
—Laura Paddison, CNN Money, 7 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for obliterate
Recent Examples of Synonyms for obliterate
Verb
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Davis has partnered with multiple programs to eradicate childhood hunger in the U.S. and recently launched the Davis-Tennon Foundation.—
Rosy Cordero,
Deadline,
30 June 2025
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Vaccines eradicated smallpox and dramatically reduced infant deaths from measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and tetanus.—
Kelsey Piper,
Vox,
27 June 2025
Verb
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Federal climate science is being systematically erased.—
Matthew Glasser,
ABC News,
1 July 2025
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The Human Constant Technological revolutions do not erase the need for human judgment.—
Solange Charas,
Forbes.com,
30 June 2025
Verb
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Lethal injection is the only method of execution after firing squads were abolished in 2011.—
Reuters,
NBC news,
26 June 2025
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Beginning in the 1950s, between 20 million and 25 million households gained ownership of plots of land through the government’s scheme to abolish the colonial-era zamindari system of tax-collecting landlords.—
Michael Albertus,
Foreign Affairs,
24 June 2025
Verb
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In September 2024, the same month as the pager attack and assassination of Hezbollah’s leader, Israel launched the most extensive campaign of airstrikes in the air force’s history hitherto, destroying much of Hezbollah’s strategic surface-to-surface missile stockpiles.—
Paul Iddon,
Forbes.com,
1 July 2025
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In Alzheimer’s disease, abnormal chemical changes cause the protein tau to stick to other tau molecules, which eventually form the hallmark toxic tangles that destroy neurons and the connections, or synapses, between them.—
New Atlas,
New Atlas,
30 June 2025
Cite this Entry
“Obliterate.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/obliterate. Accessed 8 Jul. 2025.
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