Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To make free from live bacteria or other microorganisms.
- v. To deprive (a person or an animal) of the ability to produce offspring, as by removing the reproductive organs.
- v. To make incapable of bearing fruit or germinating.
- v. To render (land) unfruitful.
- v. Economics To place (gold) in safekeeping so as not to affect the supply of money or credit.
- v. To make inoffensive or innocuous: sterilized the terminology with euphemisms.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To render sterile or unproductive in any way; specifically, in bacteriology, to render free from living germs, as by heating or otherwise. Also spelled sterilise.
Wiktionary
- v. To deprive a male or female the ability to procreate.
- v. To make unable to produce. To make unprofitable.
- v. biology To kill, deactivate (denature), or destroy (break apart) all living, viable microorganisms and spores that would be on a surface, in a fluid, or contained in a compound, such as culture media or a medical product.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. rare To make sterile or unproductive; to impoverish, as land; to exhaust of fertility.
- v. (Biol.) To deprive of the power of reproducing; to render incapable of germination or fecundation; to make sterile.
- v. (Microbiology, Medicine) To destroy all spores or germs in (an organic fluid or mixture) or on (a medical instrument), as by heat, so as to prevent contamination by bacteria or other organisms. A common method of sterilization in laboratories and medical facilities is to heat a liquid sample or an instrument in an autoclave.
- v. To destroy all spores or germs on (a surface) by wetting with an antiseptic liquid, such as an alcoholic solution.
WordNet 3.0
- v. make free from bacteria
- v. make infertile
Examples
“LUI: General Grange, the word sterilize has been used in the process as they go through the southern parts of Lebanon.”
“Steel is easy to clean and sterilize, which is invaluable when sharing a toy.”
“However, IMF conditionalities often require recipient governments to 'sterilize' the injection of additional resources so they do not increase the level of demand in the national economy.”
“He reiterated that the ECB's monetary policy stance won't be affected by the bond-buying because the ECB will be quick to reabsorb money it has paid to banks, possibly by issuing term deposits to "sterilize" the impact of the announced interventions in the euro-zone debt market.”
The Wall Street Journal: Trichet Defends ECB Independence Amid Market Relief
“When the ECB began the program in May, it pledged to "sterilize" its purchases of Greek and other debt in Europe's troubled periphery by accepting an equal amount in interest-bearing deposits from banks, so that the total overall money supply would remain unchanged.”
The Wall Street Journal: ECB Misses Deposit Goal And Euro Bears the Brunt
“In a desperate attempt to save the Euro, the European Central Bank recently bent the rules by buying Greek bonds on the secondary market rather than lending to the Greek government directly, but the ECB has said it would "sterilize" these purchases by withdrawing an equivalent amount of liquidity from the market, making the deal a wash.”
“Normally a central bank would "sterilize" a foreign-exchange intervention, draining from the market the currency sold in the intervention so that overall liquidity reflects the daily supply and demand of the banking system.”
The Wall Street Journal: Bank of Japan Signals Cooperation on Yen
“The ministry's intervention has in a sense tossed the ball into the central bank's court in that it is now up to the BOJ, the institution in charge of monetary policy, to decide whether to let all the new yen slosh around in the market, or to absorb the newly injected supply and thereby "sterilize" the intervention.”
The Wall Street Journal: Yen Intervention for Beginners: How it All Happens
“Speaking of asses, the bathroom @ our work is busted, so we can't wash our hands unless we walk 1/4 mile to the next-closest one, so now I'm forced to "sterilize" my streaked, shit-wiping-hand with only hand sanitizer.”
“Friday and to "sterilize" this intervention the ECB will have a tender on Tuesday to drain the liquidity pumped into the system.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘sterilize’.
-
Beer and Brewing
Words about beer and the making of it.
airlock, bung, carboy, diversol, hops, mashtun, beer, sparge, trub, wort, malt, malt liquor and 184 more...
-
The Blacklist
Stop SOPA.
blackout, redact, bowdlerize, censor, remove, conceal, bleach, bleep, blue-pencil, control, edit, excise and 24 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for sterilize.
ruzuzu "5. Economics To place (gold) in safekeeping so as not to affect the supply of money or credit."
--American Heritage Dictionary Sep 14, 2010