Obliterated

How to spell obliterated

11 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce obliterated

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does obliterated mean?

1. verbDestroyed something so completely that nothing of it remained, or erased it entirely.

Obliterated in a sentence

• The flood obliterated every record stored in the basement.

• A single firmware update obliterated all the saved settings on the device.

Where does obliterated come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb obliterare, which meant to blot out or erase writing, formed from the prefix ob- (here in the sense of away or out) and littera, the Latin word for a written letter of the alphabet. Literally, then, to obliterate something was to rub the letters off it, the way an ancient writer might smooth wax or scrape parchment to delete a text. English adopted the word in the sixteenth century, at first keeping close to that bookish meaning of erasing or striking out, before it broadened to its modern sense of destroying something so thoroughly that no trace survives. The buried littera also explains the spelling trap: people often want to write the more familiar sequence in obliterate as if it began like oblige, but the correct form keeps the lit of letter at its heart. The same Latin littera gives us literature, literal and obliterate alike, all of them sharing the idea of written letters.

How the word is built

• ob- (out, away)
• liter (from Latin littera: letter)
• -ate (verb)
• -ed (past tense)