Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To pick out from others; select.
- v. To gather; collect.
- v. To remove rejected members or parts from (a herd, for example).
- n. Something picked out from others, especially something rejected because of inferior quality.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To gather; pick; collect.
- To pick out; select or separate one or more of from others: often with out.
- To inspect and measure, as timber.
- n. Something picked or culled out; specifically, an object selected from among a collection or aggregate, and placed on one side, or rejected, because of inferior quality: usually in the plural: as In live-stock breeding, inferior specimens, unfit to breed from. In lumbering, inferior or defective pieces, boards, planks, etc.
- A Middle English form of kill.
- A variant of coll.
- n. A fool; a dupe.
- n. A local English (Gloucestershire) name for the fish miller's-thumb.
Wiktionary
- v. To pick someone or something.
- v. To take someone or something (from somewhere).
- v. To select animals from a group and then kill them in order to reduce the numbers of the group in a controlled manner.
- v. To kill (animals etc).
- n. A selection.
- n. An organised killing of selected animals.
- n. A fool, gullible person; a dupe.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To separate, select, or pick out; to choose and gather or collect.
- n. A cully; a dupe; a gull. See cully.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the person or thing that is rejected or set aside as inferior in quality
- v. look for and gather
- v. remove something that has been rejected
Etymologies
- Middle English cullen, from Old French cuillir, from Latin colligere; see collect1.
Examples
“A severe cull is required at these ranks for fiscal purposes alone.”
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“In your comments, a number of you were quick to point out that the wolf cull is not about sport or fair chase, but rather about wildlife management — an entirely different thing.”
“The cull is something that only comes every couple of years, and that's generally when all available space has finally run out and my wife refuses to let my dragon's hoard of books spill into another room.”
“Finally, on the to do list is to again cull through the basement and through out/give to goodwill anything we are no longer using.”
“The incidents that I have been able to cull from the internet are as follows:”
“But the Big Kahuna of those who really need to cull is my best friend.”
“With many, there was much reading of Testaments, humming over of favorite hymns, and looking at such books as I could cull from a miscellaneous library.”
“In order to get a return on our investment, Treasury must follow a plan I called cull and capitalize.”
“Anyway, the times they are a’changin, but it doesn’t really seem to have sunk in to most Boomers who they’re going to cull from the herd with health care rationing.”
“The remaining groundnut paste is rolled into thin strips, then into rings, and fried in groundnut oil to produce a popular, tasty snack (called cull cull in Ghana).”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘cull’.
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Topical
The buzzwords of our time
actionable, administrivia, advermation, agreeance, backbone provider, back-sourcing, baked in, bandwidth, barn raising, Barneyware, belly-buttons, Below Zeros and 734 more...
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
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Visuals
A list of words which yield surprising, beautiful, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy images here on Wordnik.
photochrom, fufluns, thank you, cool l..., postcard, picture postcard, cricket, physiological ill..., Gakuryū Ishii, ametropia, One Froggy Evening, rhodopsin, Santiago Calatrava and 624 more...
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Gene Wolfe
Please contribute your favorite words from any of Gene Wolfe’s books to this prize-winning list.
In case you come across words in this list which are too commonplace to fit in, please ...gallipot, roost, badelaire, oblesque, execration, dhole, amschaspand, arctother, chalcedony, penitence, asimi, autarch and 839 more...
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SAT Words
But only the ones that I don't already know.
abase, abash, abominate, abstruse, acclivity, accolade, accost, adroit, adulate, adulterate, adumbrate, affray and 241 more...
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Pickle and such
Words that end like pickle. Listed here because they're funny (because they end like pickle).
pickle, sparkle, yokel, tinkle, fickle, prickle, trickle, circle, snorkel, ensnorkel, chuckle, buckle and 137 more...
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common UA vocab. in US
Interesting, there is a traditional vocabulary of an Ukrainian, that differs from vocabulary of average American. It would be nice to explore it.
jackdaw, incongruous, cassock, vivid, magpie, humdrum, amongst, wonder, wandering, wheedling, wheedle, osseous and 368 more...
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Dean Koontz Life Expectancy
Words I'm learning or investigating that I found by reading Life Expectancy (not all words are in the book).
chutzpah, luminous, torchieres, dunderheaded, inane, lummox, fox-trot, rumba, cha-cha, tango, swing, flub and 37 more...
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Words I've found in reading.
paronomasia, spatulate, dun, cull, din, anthetic, thaumaturgic, natation, fettle, diurnal, simulacrum, propaedeutic and 14 more...

yarb Citation (sense of fool, dupe) on nubbing cheat. Dec 23, 2011
brtom "Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour."
Joyce, Ulysses, 15 Feb 6, 2007