debar
Americanverb (used with object)
-
debars,
present (3rd person singular)
-
debarred,
past participle, past
-
debarring
present participle
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
debarsimple
-
debarssimple
-
have debarredperfect
-
has debarredperfect
-
am debarringprogressive
-
are debarringprogressive
-
is debarringprogressive
-
have been debarringperfect progressive
-
has been debarringperfect progressive
Past
-
debarredsimple
-
had debarredperfect
-
was debarringprogressive
-
were debarringprogressive
-
had been debarringperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of debar
1400–50; late Middle English < Middle French, Old French desbarrer to lock out, bar. See de-, bar 1
Explanation
To debar is to officially bar, ban, or exclude someone from doing something. Debar can also mean to prevent something from happening. If you have a hat club, you can debar anyone who’s not wearing one. If someone is barred from entering, they are prevented from entering. Oddly enough, to debar them means the same thing. If you're debarred from a school, you can no longer attend. If a politician is debarred from office, they've been thrown out. You can also debar events. Eating well and exercising can debar many health problems. This kind of debarring means the same as averting. People try to debar negative things from happening.
Vocabulary lists containing debar
Paradise Lost
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Emily of New Moon
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A Room of One's Own
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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:
It is relatively rare for HHS to debar an NIH grantee.
From Science Magazine ● May 15, 2024
The effort to debar Restaurant Associates stems from its July agreement, and that of subcontractor Personnel Plus, to provide $1,008,302 in back pay to 674 workers.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 4, 2017
You would think that views like that might just debar you from holding that office, but no.
From BBC ● Nov. 8, 2015
“Sexual orientation does not debar anyone from God’s love,” it said in a statement in March.
From New York Times ● May 22, 2015
"Such a doubtful coup would not debar you from a diplomatic career."
From Poor Relations by Compton MacKenzie
The temptation to do this presses heavily on those whose occupations end with daylight and on those multitudes of elderly folk whose chief sorrow now is that age debars them from public service.
From Time Magazine Archive
She therefore repeated her remark slowly and in precisely the same words and tone— “I hope that there is no consideration as to health which debars you from this very desirable exercise, Mr Riddell?”
From The Willoughby Captains by Talbot Baines Reed
A competent knowledge of English grammar is also in itself a valuable attainment, which is within the easy reach of many young persons whose situation in life debars them from the pursuit of general literature.
From The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown
This debars us from devoting our best hours and the best part of our days to art, even though that art be the greatest and worthiest.
From Human, All-Too-Human, Part II by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
To find a chamber whose occupant is invisible debars you forever from obtaining the proof that you have found it.
From Beyond by Henry Seward Hubbard
He is excellent on the lives of women, often a contentious subject in the study of antiquity, during which women were technically debarred from holding power but sometimes did so from behind the scenes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 30, 2026
Horowitz criticized the government’s failure early on to use the “Do Not Pay” Treasury Department database, designed to keep government money from going to debarred contractors, fugitives, felons or people convicted of tax fraud.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 11, 2023
The divorced, disgraced, and debarred physician was ready to come out of the shadows: He was an illegal abortionist and had been for more than 35 years and 25,000 procedures.
From Slate ● Jun. 15, 2022
The U.N. suspended work with Glocoms in 2013 after a reporter informed it that the World Bank had debarred the company.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 23, 2016
For this doctrine, as may be presumed, he was debarred from all preaching.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
Albeit a judicial trial or censure be indeed necessary, for inflicting punishment or censure upon men, yet it is not necessary for avoiding association with them, or debarring them from trust.
From The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning by Hugh Binning
When the Athenian law debarring all but freemen from the exercise of art was enacted, Creon was at work trying to realize in marble the vision his soul had created.
From Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life by Orison Swett Marden
Yet there was both rules and practice in the church of Scotland for debarring ignorant and scandalous persons from the sacrament before he was born, though all was put out of course under the prelates.
From The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) by George Gillespie
By much musing on this matter, I have convinced myself that man is not capable of debarring himself utterly from death, since it is evidently a remedy for many evils that nothing else would cure.
From Septimius Felton, or, the Elixir of Life by Nathaniel Hawthorne
This was ingeniously framed with an appearance of justice, as if debarring from office only those who to rebellion had added perjury.
From The Negro and the Nation A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement by George Spring Merriam
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