How to Use exterminate in a Sentence

exterminate

verb
  • We made arrangements to have the termites exterminated.
  • The invaders nearly exterminated the native people.
  • Use a liquid bait placed next to the colony to exterminate the ants.
    — Timothy Dahl, Popular Mechanics, 2 Feb. 2018
  • Use a liquid bait placed next to the colony to exterminate the ants.
    — Timothy Dahl, Popular Mechanics, 30 Jan. 2017
  • Putin’s war aims to exterminate Ukraine as such.
    — Literary Hub, 18 Dec. 2025
  • There is a rash of screams too, but that noise is short-lived, soon exterminated by the gun fire.
    — Pam Houston, Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 2020
  • This is a loser monster that needs to be exterminated off the face of the earth!
    — Abigail Hauslohner, Washington Post, 5 June 2017
  • All of Yosemite was on the backs of people who were exterminated.
    — Frederick Dreier, Outside Online, 6 Feb. 2025
  • Then there are the Ultron bots, which aren’t set out to exterminate the human race.
    — Chris Smith, BGR, 11 May 2022
  • Then, the rats must be trapped and exterminated, and the mites killed with pesticide.
    — CBS News, 13 June 2017
  • The pace of killings slackened, with cadres told to reeducate rather than exterminate those who’d strayed.
    — Matthew Campbell, Bloomberg, 22 May 2026
  • The most primal end to this line of thinking was that threats to the Volk had to be exterminated.
    — Seth Mnookin, New York Times, 18 June 2018
  • The June Bug is exterminated and left out of the film, and sorely missed.
    — Samuel Maude, ELLE, 11 Aug. 2023
  • At the start people believed this was a new strategy to exterminate them.
    — Max Bearak, Washington Post, 20 June 2019
  • Word was beginning to leak out about the Nazis’ plan to exterminate the Jews en masse.
    — Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2026
  • More than half of the people exterminated by the Nazis were from Poland.
    — NBC News, 12 Apr. 2018
  • The hunt for the killer soon puts him face-to-face with a humanoid beast that will stop at nothing to exterminate the one witness to the crime.
    — Alex Ritman, The Hollywood Reporter, 24 Oct. 2019
  • The screen villain’s mad impulse to exterminate half the universe?
    — Tom Russo, BostonGlobe.com, 20 Apr. 2018
  • The idea would be to exterminate tens of thousands of invasive house mice that have taken over the islands.
    — Peter Fimrite, SFChronicle.com, 10 July 2019
  • That's a good strategy, because pathogens that don't exterminate their host species are able to live longer and spread more widely.
    — The Washington Post, NOLA.com, 17 May 2018
  • With the feisty insect exterminated, the focus was back to the most in-demand celebrity of the year.
    — Jada Yuan, Washington Post, 2 May 2023
  • More Mexican wolves are in the wild now than at any time since they were nearly exterminated decades ago.
    — Washington Post, 18 June 2019
  • Some of them fear that efforts to exterminate the incurable will lead, inevitably, to assaults on the cured.
    — Gary Thompson, Philly.com, 28 Feb. 2018
  • Barely worth mentioning but a hostile alien race known as the Scryve want to exterminate us.
    — Brad Chacos, PCWorld, 11 June 2018
  • The district had the bees exterminated the next morning.
    — Madeleine Parrish, AZCentral.com, 10 May 2025
  • Noah and his floating menagerie survived 40 days and nights of exterminating rain.
    — Andrew Gilbert, Mercury News, 1 Dec. 2025
  • Go back to Israel or better yet, exterminate yourself and save us the trouble.
    — Patrick Damp, CBS News, 10 June 2026
  • Mao thought sparrows were a pest, exterminated them, and caused a famine that killed millions of Chinese.
    — Itxu Díaz, National Review, 31 Dec. 2023
  • Here's how to combine the two for an ant-exterminating solution.
    — Rabekah Henderson, The Spruce, 5 June 2026
  • Here's how to combine the two for an ant-exterminating solution.
    — Rabekah Henderson, The Spruce, 3 Mar. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'exterminate.' 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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