eviscerate
Americanverb (used with object)
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to remove the entrails from; disembowel.
to eviscerate a chicken.
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to deprive of vital or essential parts.
The censors eviscerated the book to make it inoffensive to the leaders of the party.
-
Surgery. to remove the contents of (a body organ).
verb
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(tr) to remove the internal organs of; disembowel
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(tr) to deprive of meaning or significance
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(tr) surgery to remove the contents of (the eyeball or other organ)
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(intr) surgery (of the viscera) to protrude through a weakened abdominal incision after an operation
adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
evisceratesimple
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evisceratessimple
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have evisceratedperfect
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has evisceratedperfect
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am evisceratingprogressive
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are evisceratingprogressive
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is evisceratingprogressive
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have been evisceratingperfect progressive
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has been evisceratingperfect progressive
Past
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evisceratedsimple
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had evisceratedperfect
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was evisceratingprogressive
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were evisceratingprogressive
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had been evisceratingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of eviscerate
First recorded in 1600–10; from Latin ēviscerātus, past participle of ēviscerāre “to deprive of entrails, tear to pieces,” equivalent to ē- e- 1 + viscer(a) viscera + -ātus -ate 1
Explanation
Eviscerate is not a pretty word. To eviscerate can mean to remove the entrails of a creature. On the Discovery Channel you can watch a vulture eviscerate or take out the guts of a dead animal. The word eviscerate comes from the Latin eviscerare, meaning "to disembowel." It's not strictly used in such a gruesome sense though. Sure, you can eviscerate a chicken by gutting its insides, but eviscerate can also be used to describe when you deprive something of its most important quality. If you take away the disco ball, it could eviscerate the spirit of your dance party.
Vocabulary lists containing eviscerate
The Things They Carried
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam" (1967)
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"On the Vietnam War, 1967," Vocabulary from the speech
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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:
If something went awry, as things generally did, Jobs would find a scapegoat to eviscerate, preferably in front of everyone else.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 17, 2026
He turns around and uses that wealth and power in order to eviscerate the very thing that helped create him.
From Slate ● Aug. 1, 2025
Big business has been trying to eviscerate anti-fraud laws for more than a century.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2024
Corker noted the NCAA’s contention that allowing so-called NIL collectives to offer deals to recruits would eviscerate the difference between college athletics and professional sports.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 23, 2024
He didn’t know anyone who could eviscerate someone with words quite like Aunt Hila.
From "Night Owls" by A.R. Vishny
She pulls from Karl Marx and eviscerates the mind-set of those she calls “productivity bros.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 4, 2023
Peters doesn’t just eviscerate, though; she also eviscerates the impulse to eviscerate.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 6, 2021
Pierceson Coody steps in first and tees his ball, then eviscerates a drive that, when it finally lands, bounces and disappears over a ripple in the fairway some 315 yards away.
From Golf Digest ● Dec. 2, 2019
She eviscerates moral philosophers who believe that moral rules can be utterly divorced from biology and find a foundation based on reasoning alone.
From Nature ● May 27, 2019
It falls upon the tiny Crickets, eviscerates them, and devours them with frantic greed.
From Social Life in the Insect World by Miall, Bernard
The already precarious labor market is being eviscerated by further automation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 26, 2026
Courts have allowed the broad electronic privacy protections in the federal Wiretap Act to be eviscerated by companies claiming consent.
From Salon ● Apr. 23, 2026
And this influencer, with a sharp blond bob and glass skin, is trying on jackets at a small-town Goodwill, where the merchandise has not yet been eviscerated by other consumers completing their own “hauls.”
From Slate ● Jan. 26, 2026
That document was roundly eviscerated by hordes of scientists who were aghast at the distortions and misinterpretations by Kennedy.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 2, 2025
They'll be quoted, parsed, fact-checked, eviscerated by those who disagree, and then forgotten in the wake of new blurbs that come out tomorrow.
From "How It Went Down" by Kekla Magoon
Season 2 follows many of the same formulas, replete with eviscerating comebacks from Daddy’s Little Viper.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2025
But the highlight of the night was the live debut of Lamar's song Not Like Us - an eviscerating take-down of Canadian star Drake, which brought their long-running feud to a decisive end last month.
From BBC ● Jun. 20, 2024
In announcing the Eugene outlet, Doctor noted that like Santa Cruz, “the area has seen the result of chain ownership eviscerating a once-well-established daily,” The Register-Guard.
From Seattle Times ● May 8, 2024
But in an opinion on Tuesday eviscerating his assertion, three federal appeals court judges portrayed his position as not only wrong on the law but also repellent.
From New York Times ● Feb. 6, 2024
Though his superior in sheer strength, she was much smaller and lighter than he, and less murderously armed for combat; and she dreaded the raking, eviscerating clutch of his terrible hinder claws.
From The House in the Water A Book of Animal Stories by Bull, Charles Livingston
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.
