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Synonyms

supplant

American  
[suh-plant, -plahnt] / səˈplænt, -ˈplɑnt /

verb (used with object)

  • supplants,
    present (3rd person singular)
  • supplanted,
    past participle,  past
  • supplanting
    present participle
  1. to take the place of (another), as through force, scheming, strategy, or the like.

    Synonyms:
    succeed, remove
  2. to replace (one thing) by something else.


supplant British  
/ səˈplɑːnt /

verb

  1. (tr) to take the place of, often by trickery or force

    he easily supplanted his rival

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Synonym Usage

See replace.

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

Inflected Forms

Participles

Conjugated Forms

Present

Past

Future

Etymology

Origin of supplant

First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English supplanten, from Latin supplantāre “to trip up, overthrow”; see sup-, plant

Explanation

Kate was out sick for a whole month, and when she came back to school, Jessie had supplanted her as the funny girl at the lunch table. Supplant means "to take the place of." Being supplanted is something that often happens to ideas or ways of thinking. Encouraging children's freedom has supplanted old ideas about children being better seen than heard. After a shocking upset at Wimbledon, a new tennis player has supplanted the reigning champion.

Keep Reading on Vocabulary.com

Vocabulary lists containing supplant

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:

After all, I’d never lay myself off, push any convoluted apps down my own throat, replace me with AI or let students use chatbots to supplant themselves.

From Salon ● Aug. 24, 2026

While artificial intelligence can help advisers operate more efficiently, there’s little indication that it can supplant experienced financial planners.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 24, 2026

Soccer probably won’t supplant my love for baseball, football, basketball and hockey — but I can now mention it in the same breath as them.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 20, 2026

Big tech rivals have long tried to supplant Apple, but thus far Google, Samsung, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.com have all failed.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026

Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its own needs and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

But those earnings could become more volatile if artificial intelligence supplants the sort of back-office systems that TCS provides.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 27, 2026

This is a crucial piece to the puzzle, because production of one gigabyte of HBM supplants three gigabytes of other types of memory, worsening shortages down the line.

From Barron's ● Jan. 9, 2026

The recently snared behemoth supplants the previous record of 18 feet, 9 inches, which was set in 2020 by professional trappers.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 21, 2023

Their carbon footprint will further drop as renewable energy supplants electricity generated from fossil fuels in the years to come, she said.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 26, 2022

We saw its results in such geometries as Hilbert's and172 Peano's, where the empty name "entity" supplants the more concrete "point," and the "1" of arithmetic has the same character.

From Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude by Boyd H. Bode

The survey shows that fears about surging borrowing costs have even supplanted worries about the AI trade possibly turning into a bubble.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 15, 2026

The musicians who supplanted the East Village folkies were by that time dinosaurs themselves, having been rendered extinct by pop permutations several times over.

From Salon ● Aug. 29, 2026

China supplanted America as the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods in 2010, and the gap has only widened since then.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026

Framed this way, mathematicians are not in a race against A.I.s, waiting for the dreaded Kasparov moment when we become supplanted.

From Slate ● Jun. 22, 2026

She told him how the strange animal had supplanted her and how nobody had been prepared to listen to her explanation at the beginning.

From "The Girl Who Married a Lion: and Other Tales from Africa" by Alexander Mccall Smith

Artisanal butter has become Paris’s must-have status souvenir, supplanting Ladurée macarons and drugstore skin care.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 23, 2026

At a time when servers are being shut down, physical media is being digitized out of existence, and the subscription model is supplanting personal ownership, Ruth believes this is a way to have data autonomy.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2026

However the multinational bank also believes that a potential offering from Charter and SpaceX would fall short of supplanting any of the major cellular service providers in the U.S.

From Barron's ● Jun. 29, 2026

She wrote that considering legislative history “prevents the preferences of judges from supplanting the will of the people.”

From Slate ● Jun. 11, 2026

Her son’s resistance to schoolwork was a mild disorder that many children go through, but his study of chess, an intellectual activity, was supplanting it.

From "Endgame" by Frank Brady

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