Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To cut off the head of; behead.
- transitive verb To destroy or incapacitate (a government or organization, for example) by killing or removing its leader or leaders.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To behead; cut off the head of.
- To remove from office summarily.
- In mathematics, to strike out, as the highest number of the symbol, in the symbolic method of calculating seminvariants.
- Of a word, to cut off the beginning.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To cut off the head of; to behead.
- transitive verb Colloq. U. S. To remove summarily from office.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb transitive To
remove thehead of.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb cut the head of
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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There's an intriguing story in today's Telegraph about how the Tories plan to "decapitate" - that is, target and win the seats of - certain Labour ministers come the next election.
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There's an intriguing story in today's Telegraph about how the Tories plan to "decapitate" - that is, target and win the seats of - certain Labour ministers come the next election.
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They were to give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed.
Tom Engelhardt: Why Military Dreams Fail -- and Why It Doesn't Matter 2009
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The Bush administration fanaticized about using shock and awe to "decapitate" the Iraqi regime, and then -- King Midas-like -- touching the country to make it prosperous, civil, and — most important for the Bush administration — compliant.
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Bush has refused to authorize an assassination attempt, though there have been U.S. efforts to "decapitate" the Iraqi leadership through air raids on Baghdad bunkers.
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Our willy-nilly attempts to "decapitate" Saddam's regime with bunker busters was only a small part of the shock-and-awe bombing campaign that sowed death and depleted-uranium dust (a cancer-causing, DNA-altering time bomb) throughout Iraq.
Celebrity Carnage 2007
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Bush and his war cabinet, including Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell, hastily convened at the White House to consider an airstrike to "decapitate" the Iraqi leadership.
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He said certain people wanted to "decapitate" him and "render the organisation rudderless".
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According to the rebels 'Radio Vorgan monitored in Luanda, UNITA accused Angolan authorities of trying to "decapitate" the movement by military means by "setting traps" for its fighters.
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Britain's David Haye has said that he is going to "decapitate" John Ruiz in Saturday's WBA heavyweight …
Yahoo! News: Latest news headlines News Headlines | Top Stories 2010
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