Word.ws English Dictionary

expell

expell is the obsolete form of expel.

Meaning of expel

Verb

expel (third-person singular simple present expels, present participle expelling, simple past and past participle expelled)

  1. (transitive) To eject.
  2. (obsolete, transitive) To fire (a bullet, arrow etc.).
    • But to the ground the idle quarrell fell: / Then he another and another did expell.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  3. (transitive) To remove from membership.
    • He was expelled from school multiple times for disruptive behaviour.
  4. (transitive) To deport.

Forms of expell

third-person singular presentexpells
present participleexpelling
past participleexpelled
pastexpelled

Questions about expell

What is expell the obsolete form of?
Expell is the obsolete form of expel.

Words near expell in the dictionary

  1. expel
  2. expeled
  3. expelee
  4. expelees
  5. expeling
  6. expell
  7. expellable
  8. expellant
  9. expellants
  10. expelled
  11. expellee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: expell (page history and authors); expel (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: “expell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/expell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.