Word.ws English Dictionary

depopulating

depopulating is the present participle and gerund of depopulate.

Meaning of depopulate

Verb

depopulate (third-person singular simple present depopulates, present participle depopulating, simple past and past participle depopulated)

  1. (transitive) To reduce the population of a region by disease, war, forced relocation etc.
    • Where is this viper / That would depopulate the city and / Be every man himself?c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
  2. (transitive) To remove the components from a circuit board.
  3. (intransitive) To become depopulated, to lose its population.
    • […] the country […] has been rapidly depopulating, and utterly draining of its vital resources, till the unhappy population have sunk to the lowest depth of misery.1849, William Henry Bartlett, chapter 1, in The Nile Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt, London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co, page 29

See all 5 meanings of depopulate

Questions about depopulating

What is depopulating the present participle and gerund of?
Depopulating is the present participle and gerund of depopulate.

Words near depopulating in the dictionary

  1. depopularizes
  2. depopularizing
  3. depopulate
  4. depopulated
  5. depopulates
  6. depopulating
  7. depopulation
  8. depopulations
  9. depopulative
  10. depopulator
  11. depopulators

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: depopulating (page history and authors); depopulate (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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Cite this entry: “depopulating.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/depopulating. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.