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Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. v. To pick out from others; select.
  2. v. To gather; collect.
  3. v. To remove rejected members or parts from (a herd, for example).
  4. n. Something picked out from others, especially something rejected because of inferior quality.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. To gather; pick; collect.
  2. To pick out; select or separate one or more of from others: often with out.
  3. To inspect and measure, as timber.
  4. 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.
  5. A Middle English form of kill.
  6. A variant of coll.
  7. n. A fool; a dupe.
  8. n. A local English (Gloucestershire) name for the fish miller's-thumb.

Wiktionary

  1. v. To pick someone or something.
  2. v. To take someone or something (from somewhere).
  3. v. To select animals from a group and then kill them in order to reduce the numbers of the group in a controlled manner.
  4. v. To kill (animals etc).
  5. n. A selection.
  6. n. An organised killing of selected animals.
  7. n. A fool, gullible person; a dupe.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. v. To separate, select, or pick out; to choose and gather or collect.
  2. n. A cully; a dupe; a gull. See cully.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. the person or thing that is rejected or set aside as inferior in quality
  2. v. look for and gather
  3. v. remove something that has been rejected

Etymologies

  1. 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.”

    Feinstein Right: Aerial Wolf Management is NOT Fair Chase

  • “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.”

    Does Your Bookshelf Reflect You or Your Future?

  • “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.”

    Reducing Recycling

  • “The incidents that I have been able to cull from the internet are as follows:”

    How Blair is killing our soldiers

  • “But the Big Kahuna of those who really need to cull is my best friend.”

    Archive 2004-11-01

  • “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.”

    Hospital Sketches

  • “In order to get a return on our investment, Treasury must follow a plan I called cull and capitalize.”

    BloggingStocks

  • “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.”

    Unpacking the Rasmussen partisan numbers. | RedState

  • “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).”

    Chapter 6

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Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘cull’.

Comments

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  • 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

‘cull’ has been looked up 2000 times, loved by 7 people, added to 46 lists, commented on 2 times, and has a Scrabble score of 6.