Word.ws English Dictionary

defacement

/dɪˈfeɪsmənt/

defacement noun: an act of defacing; an instance of visibly marring or disfiguring something.

Noun

defacement (countable and uncountable, plural defacements)

  1. An act of defacing; an instance of visibly marring or disfiguring something.
    • Some consider the defacement of the Sphinx to be the most egregious crime of Napolean's campaigns.
  2. An act of voiding or devaluing; nullification of the face value.
    • The soldiers found a variety of creative uses for their payment scrip after its defacement to scrap paper; some used it as toilet paper.
  3. A symbol added to a flag or coat of arms to change it or make it different from another.

Synonyms of defacement

All synonyms of defacement

Forms of defacement

pluraldefacements

Origin of defacement

From deface + -ment.

Words that rhyme with defacement

Questions about defacement

What does defacement mean?
Defacement means an act of defacing; an instance of visibly marring or disfiguring something.
What part of speech is defacement?
Defacement is a noun.
How do you pronounce defacement?
Defacement is pronounced /dɪˈfeɪsmənt/.
What is the plural of defacement?
The plural of defacement is defacements.

Words near defacement in the dictionary

  1. def'ns
  2. def.
  3. deface
  4. defaceable
  5. defaced
  6. defacement
  7. defacements
  8. defacer
  9. defacers
  10. defaces
  11. defacing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: defacement (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-defacement.wav.

Cite this entry: “defacement.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/defacement. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.