culled

Verb

cull (third-person singular simple present culls, present participle culling, simple past and past participle culled)

1. To pick or take someone or something (from a larger group).
   • 1984, cover star: JOE DALLESANDRO culled from Andy Warhol's FLESH — anonymous; sleeve notes from The Smiths' eponymous album

   Synonyms:

   cherry-pick

2. To gather, collect.
   • [T]he yellowbanded bees, / Through half-open lattices / Coming in the scented breeze, / Fed thee, a child, lying alone, / With whitest honey in fairy gardens culled— […]1832 December (indicated as 1833), Alfred Tennyson, “Eleanore”, in Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 26
3. To select (animals, plants, etc) from a group and then kill (them) in order to reduce the numbers of the group in a controlled manner.
   • […] and tropical ash (81 percent of trees culled). Excessive lean, the second major culling factor, accounted for […] 13 percent of the tropical ash cull trees, and […]1970, USDA Forest Service Research Paper PSW, issues 66-77, page 3
4. (broadly) To kill (an animal, person, etc) for any reason.
   • Berzin was then replaced by Stiepan Garanin, who was culled for being a 'Japanese spy' (although the uneducated Garanin pleaded to his torturers that he had never even heard of Japan); Garanin was then replaced by Andrei Vyshnyevtsky, who was culled for being insufficiently murderous; Vyshnyevtsky...2002, Stephen Barber, Annihilation Zones: Far East Atrocities of the 20th Century, page 106
5. To lay off in order to reduce the numbers of; get rid of.
   • The company culled more employees this month.
6. To selectively not render or process certain objects, such as polygons.
   • back-face culling

See all 14 meanings of cull