overgraze
Americanverb (used with object)
verb
Etymology
Origin of overgraze
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:
They're not inclined to overgraze because they're always moving.
From Salon ● Nov. 27, 2022
Officials say the horses overgraze the land and negatively impact the environment, a problem compounded by the extensive drought.
From Washington Times ● Nov. 2, 2015
“They tend to overgraze the vegetation around water sources,” he said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2015
"You could overgraze an arid land and convert it permanently to desert—that's a local threshold," Kareiva explains.
From Scientific American ● Nov. 7, 2013
Hardin’s idea explains why public bathrooms are so gross, why people litter, and, according to his original example, why farmers will let their cows overgraze communal fields.
From BusinessWeek ● Jul. 26, 2012
Finally, four days after Bamberger took his company public, in 1969, he bought the land of his dreams: 3,000 horribly overgrazed and eroded acres of derelict ranchland in Johnson City, Texas.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 4, 2026
The group claims the invasive deer have destroyed natural habitat — including vegetation found only on the island — and exacerbated the risk of soil erosion in overgrazed areas.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 29, 2024
"If an auroch or mammoth overgrazed, then the plant alkaloids would make it not feel very well," he says.
From BBC ● Jul. 10, 2023
Sanctuaries such as Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had emerged as “overpopulated, overgrazed wasteland,” he argued, as elephants and rhinos struggled to find food and eventually starved by the thousands.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 26, 2020
Some trucks carried hay bales which farmers dumped into dusty corrals or into minuscule overgrazed plots for horses and sheep.
From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols
So, in 1934, as Depression-era dust storms darkened the skies over the Great Plains, worsened by overgrazing that denuded grasslands, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Taylor Grazing Act, named for the lawmaker.
From Salon ● Dec. 4, 2025
According to conservationists, the species has suffered at the hands of illegal poaching, overgrazing, drought, and disease passed from farm animals.
From BBC ● Aug. 2, 2024
As tropical herbivores move into subtropical waters, overgrazing may prevent subtropical seagrass meadows from persisting in these environments.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 6, 2024
The world is rapidly losing usable land for self-inflicted reasons, ranging from intensive agriculture and overgrazing of livestock to real estate development and, yes, climate change.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 18, 2024
But on the black land twenty minutes down the road, the soil has been decimated by years of overfarming and overgrazing.
From "Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
