exterminate
Americanverb (used with object)
-
exterminates,
present (3rd person singular)
-
exterminated,
past participle, past
-
exterminating
present participle
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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exterminationnoun
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exterminatornoun
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nonexterminationnoun
-
self-exterminationnoun
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exterminableadjective
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exterminativeadjective
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unexterminableadjective
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unexterminatedadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
exterminatesimple
-
exterminatessimple
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have exterminatedperfect
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has exterminatedperfect
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am exterminatingprogressive
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are exterminatingprogressive
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is exterminatingprogressive
-
have been exterminatingperfect progressive
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has been exterminatingperfect progressive
Past
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exterminatedsimple
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had exterminatedperfect
-
was exterminatingprogressive
-
were exterminatingprogressive
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had been exterminatingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of exterminate
1535–45; < Latin exterminātus, past participle of extermināre to extermine; see -ate 1
Explanation
If your house becomes infested with cockroaches, mice, or even ants, you might have to exterminate them. It is certainly not a pleasant process, but often quite necessary. To exterminate means "to kill off or destroy completely." Notice that it includes the word terminate which means, “to end.” It is usually used in reference to insects or rodents, but also unfortunately in reference to people or groups of people. It is just a coincidence that this verb shares a syllable with termite — a bug that often has to be exterminated before it eats through the wood of your home.
Vocabulary lists containing exterminate
"The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving
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Persepolis
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Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In 17th century Ireland, Robyn Goodfellowe is an apprentice hunter who follows her father when he’s called in to exterminate wolves.
From Salon ● Dec. 24, 2025
The grower reported having to exterminate between 50 and 100 rats per day.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 8, 2025
Mr. Biden will travel to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to deliver the keynote address of the Holocaust museum’s yearly event and remember the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe.
From New York Times ● May 1, 2024
Musk is convinced of this, in part, because he fears artificial intelligence will very soon become all-powerful and inclined to exterminate homo sapiens.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 28, 2024
To extirpate is to exterminate or destroy a living entity or group so completely that it ceases to exist forever.
From "An Indigenous People’s History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
While she has been seemingly ruthless in her job as a sniper who exterminates the game players who fail, she also has sympathy for Gyeong-seok, having left behind a daughter of her own up North.
From Salon ● Dec. 29, 2024
If some chance event exterminates them—for example the glaciers freezing fast onto their beds—then the likelihood of new animals making it in from the outside to recolonize the lakes afterward is extremely low.
From Scientific American ● Feb. 3, 2015
The Inheritors, by William Golding In the dawn of consciousness, the new race, Homo sapiens, exterminates the Neander thal men, demonstrating the author's point that history moves in blind ways.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the dawn of consciousness, the new race, Homo sapiens, exterminates the Neanderthal men, demonstrating the author's point that history moves in blind ways.
From Time Magazine Archive
And yet they allow that in a few cases, nature, without the assistance of a physician, exterminates the poison of this fatal disease, and a perfect recovery is produced.
From A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 by Robert Kerr
Within about 50 years, the crocodiles had been completely exterminated.
From Science Daily ● May 28, 2026
Along with the passenger pigeon we exterminated the great auk, the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck and the ivory-billed woodpecker.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 23, 2026
Live mosquitoes will be exterminated using ultraviolet light.
From BBC ● Feb. 19, 2025
It’s as though, having all but exterminated a plague, we decided we no longer needed to keep up the pyric hygiene that contained it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 14, 2025
Hunters expanding southward through the Americas, encountering big animals that had never seen humans before, may have found those American animals easy to kill and may have exterminated them.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
Liias — who is a self-proclaimed pollinator champion — recently sponsored Senate Bill 5972 to restrict neonicotinoids, or a particularly harmful class of pesticides that kill indiscriminately, exterminating not only pests but also countless pollinators.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 23, 2024
But the city met stiff opposition to trapping or exterminating the rodents.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2024
"They are called weeds by gardeners, but they have value, and we should be celebrating the dandelions not exterminating them," he said.
From BBC ● Apr. 11, 2023
He cited a persistence instilled in him by his father, who ran an exterminating company and died last year, as a motivating factor.
From New York Times ● Aug. 7, 2022
During those four weeks in Carthage, McCandless worked hard, doing dirty, tedious jobs that nobody else wanted to tackle: mucking out warehouses, exterminating vermin, painting, scything weeds.
From "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
