How to Use depopulate in a Sentence

depopulate

verb
  • Large areas of the country had been depopulated by disease.
  • The options the state gave us was to test every bird on the farm or depopulate.
    — Stephen Underwood, Hartford Courant, 10 Feb. 2026
  • The smart thing to do is before the virus takes off in a jail or prison to depopulate it safely and quickly.
    — Ryan Prior, CNN, 14 Apr. 2020
  • If a turkey is infected with the bird flu, the rest of the flock must be depopulated.
    — Solcyré Burga, TIME, 25 Nov. 2024
  • The push to depopulate the halls and camps comes as the state sends more young offenders into the county’s care.
    — Rebecca Ellis, Los Angeles Times, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Once a bird is infected, the only way to stop the virus from spreading further is to depopulate or cull the entire flock.
    — Mary Kekatos, ABC News, 12 Feb. 2025
  • On top of that, there is a clear attempt, and this was clear from last year, from the 2024 conflict, to depopulate the south.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 9 Apr. 2026
  • Many of these structures are now crumbling, the communes depopulated.
    — Christine Ro, Longreads, 17 Sep. 2024
  • So all of this adds up to literally depopulating areas in the south and kicking some of the Shias out.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 9 Apr. 2026
  • My cat, Jean-Luc, has depopulated our entire backyard of chipmunks in just one year.
    — Steve Bender, Southern Living, 4 June 2025
  • They are often depopulated, shot painstakingly on large-format film and in color.
    — Christopher Bonanos, Curbed, 3 Sep. 2025
  • Wittenberg did fall, to that same Charles V who had depopulated Rome.
    — Marilynne Robinson, New Republic, 12 Dec. 2017
  • Both sides of the seventy-five-mile-wide frontier have been largely depopulated, except for soldiers.
    — Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, 22 July 2024
  • The affected area has been quarantined and birds on the property have been depopulated to prevent spread.
    — Angelica Stabile, Fox News, 19 Mar. 2025
  • But the depopulating East Side needs more than just new construction and faster internet.
    — Mike Hendricks, Kansas City Star, 24 June 2024
  • Around Damascus, entire neighborhoods lay razed and depopulated, and much of the city center looked dingy and worn.
    — Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, 30 Dec. 2024
  • There are federal agencies that Trump is in the process of shutting down and others that have been defunded and depopulated.
    — Rosa Lyster, Harpers Magazine, 30 Dec. 2025
  • The problem is there just aren’t enough urban areas in Iowa to offset the losses elsewhere, even as the cities grow while rural areas depopulate.
    — Ben Jacobs, The New Republic, 28 June 2022
  • By this point in the war, the surrounding neighborhood, Zeitoun, was largely depopulated.
    — Patrick Kingsley, New York Times, 26 Dec. 2024
  • In fairness, real estate agents have to work hard to sell properties in depopulating rural parts of Germany.
    — Chris Bryant | Bloomberg, Washington Post, 11 Oct. 2019
  • Yet over the past two centuries, these people have either moved away or died out, leaving the countryside increasingly depopulated and silent.
    — Patrick Joyce, Foreign Affairs, 23 Apr. 2024
  • In an effort to prevent spread of the disease, all birds on the properties were depopulated and the businesses will not be allowed to move poultry products.
    — Journal Sentinel, 6 Jan. 2024
  • The city was largely destroyed and mostly depopulated during the war, and is now in the half of Gaza that is under full Israeli control.
    — Wafaa Shurafa, Los Angeles Times, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Much of southern Lebanon has been both devastated by military strikes and depopulated.
    — Hussein Ibish, The Atlantic, 23 Apr. 2026
  • At a time when companies in depopulating eastern Germany need immigrants to fill skilled and unskilled jobs, some voters want to pull up the drawbridge.
    — The Economist, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Should anyone literally expect that humanity will depopulate down to the last two people?
    — Literary Hub, 8 Aug. 2025
  • The novel follows the life of Dylan, the daughter of a researcher, cast adrift on an earth that has been depopulated by war and environmental collapse.
    — Fiction Non Fiction, Literary Hub, 18 June 2026
  • Chief executive Dave Bateman claims coronavirus vaccines are part of a plot to depopulate the Earth.
    — Bryan Schott, The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 Jan. 2022
  • The areas that were thereby depopulated remained so for a long time thereafter; many became the wildlife reserves for which Tanzania is famous today.
    — Carey Baraka, Quartz Africa, 26 Apr. 2020
  • State agencies have depopulated and disposed of a non-commercial, mixed-species backyard flock (non-poultry) in Essex County due to the virus.
    — Rick Sobey, Boston Herald, 6 Feb. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'depopulate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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