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  1. defoliate love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. v. To deprive (a plant, tree, or forest) of leaves.
  2. v. To cause the leaves of (a plant, tree, or forest) to fall off, especially by the use of chemicals.
  3. v. To lose foliage.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. To deprive of leaves; cut or pick off the leaves of.
  2. Deprived of leaves; having cast its leaves.

Wiktionary

  1. v. transitive To remove foliage from (one or more plants), most often with a chemical agent.
  2. adj. Deprived of leaves; defoliated.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Deprived of leaves, as by their natural fall.
  2. v. to cause (a plant) to shed its leaves.

WordNet 3.0

  1. v. strip the leaves or branches from
  2. adj. deprived of leaves

Etymologies

  1. de- +‎ foliate (Wiktionary)
  2. Late Latin dēfoliāre, dēfoliāt- : Latin dē-, de- + Latin folium, leaf; see bhel-3 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “Six months ago, Gary hired a goateed designer to "defoliate" the office,  trucking out all the ficus trees and spanish moss to make room for curved sheets of fiberglass and, as he called it, "negative space.”

    Fictionaut: Overboard

  • “Six months ago, Gary hired a goateed designer to "defoliate" the office, trucking out all the ficus trees and spanish moss to make room for curved sheets of fiberglass and, as he called it, "negative space.”

    Fictionaut: Overboard

  • “It is naturally shrubby and over the winter the wiry framework will defoliate, but I will wait until March to shape it up with the shears.”

    The Guardian: Stunning salvias

  • “It would seem more appropriate to pull out of Afghanistan and make it abundantly clear that the next time an attack against the US is traceable to folks who were trained or in anyway supported by folks in Afghanistan, we will obliterate Afghanistan and defoliate its opium poppies.”

    War Czar for Bush to Keep His Job - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com

  • “The teabaggers can go defoliate their scrotums, for all I care.”

    Think Progress » Fox ‘News’ cheerleads for Tea Party protesters.

  • “Metrics such as use of "body counts" and scientific solutions such as using the herbicide Agent Orange to defoliate jungles in which communist guerrillas hid became trademarks of the conflict.”

    Vietnam-era Pentagon chief McNamara dead at 93

  • “Leonard "Marty" Kardes, 64, suffers disabling neurological problems due to exposure to Agent Orange, a chemical the U.S. military used to defoliate trees in Vietnamese jungles.”

    Heroes or Villains?

  • “We need to defoliate some of the beans to help them ripen, not in the least the borlotti, who's beans sit in almost total darkness beneath a dense lagging of leaves.”

    The Guardian: Here comes the rain (again)

  • “This means trees that defoliate have time to renew their sugar stores before future outbreaks.”

    The Washington Post: Beware of late blight, and report damage

  • “Then 1975 sees Operation Condor, in which DEA agents, with the Mexican army, bomb, burn, and defoliate vast acreage of poppy cultivation in Sinaloa, displacing thousands of peasants and wrecking the economy.”

    Simon & Schuster: Savages

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equivalents (2)

Other words for ‘defoliate’

  1. leafless
  1. defoliated

hypernyms (4)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. denude
  1. denudate
  1. strip
  1. bare

reverse dictionary (4)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. leaf-cutter
  1. maple-worm
  1. brown-tail moth
  1. Agent Orange

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‘defoliate’ has been looked up 1264 times, loved by 1 person, added to 14 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 13.