Word of the Day

: February 27, 2013

expunge

verb ix-SPUNJ

What It Means

1 : to strike out, obliterate, or mark for deletion

2 : to efface completely : destroy

3 : to eliminate (as a memory) from one's consciousness

expunge in Context

Time and the forces of nature have expunged any evidence that a thriving community once existed in that location.

"Eligible veterans can avoid jail time or get their charges expunged if they complete an intensive treatment and rehabilitation program." - From an article by Tracie Mauriello and Anya Sostek in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 22, 2012

Did You Know?

In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a series of dots was used to mark mistakes or to label material that should be deleted from a text, and those deletion dots can help you remember the history of "expunge." They were known as "puncta delentia." The "puncta" part of the name derives from the Latin verb "pungere," which can be translated as "to prick or sting" (and you can imagine that a scribe may have felt stung when his mistakes were so punctuated in a manuscript). "Pungere" is also an ancestor of "expunge," as well as a parent of other dotted, pointed, or stinging terms such as "punctuate," "compunction," "poignant," "puncture," and "pungent."