Eradicate

How to spell eradicate

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce eradicate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eradicate mean?

1. verbTo destroy or remove something completely, leaving none of it behind.

Eradicate in a sentence

• The campaign aims to eradicate polio from every remaining region.

• Strict hygiene rules helped the hospital eradicate the infection.

Where does eradicate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb eradicare, which meant 'to tear up by the roots'. It was built from the prefix e- (a form of ex-, meaning 'out') and the noun radix, meaning 'root', so the literal image is of yanking a weed clean out of the ground so that nothing remains to grow back. That same radix gives us the everyday words 'radish' (an edible root) and 'radical' (something that goes to the root of a matter), so the family resemblance is a useful reminder that the spelling carries 'radic', not 'redic'. English adopted the word in the fifteenth century, at first for the literal uprooting of plants, and the vivid figurative sense of stamping out a disease, a habit, or an evil completely soon followed. The single d and the unstressed middle vowel are the usual traps: it is e-rad-i-cate, with one d, echoing the Latin root radix.

How the word is built

• e- (variant of ex-: out)
• radic (root, from Latin radix)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)