extinct
Pronunciation: /ɪkˈstɪŋkt/
The English word “extinct” has 14 meanings listed here.
adjective
- Of fire, etc.: no longer alight; of a light, etc.: no longer shining; extinguished, quenched.
- Of feelings, a person's spirit, a state of affairs, etc.: put out, as if like a fire; quenched, suppressed.
- Of customs, ideas, laws and legal rights, offices, organizations, languages, etc.: no longer existing or in use; defunct, discontinued, obsolete; specifically, of a title of nobility: no longer having any person qualified to hold it.
- Of an animal or plant species or group of species, a group of people, a family, etc., having no living members, representatives, or descendants.
- Of a geological feature: no longer active; specifically, of a volcano: no longer erupting.
- Of a radioisotope: no longer occurring primordially due to having decayed away completely, because it has a relatively short half-life.
- Of a person: dead; also, permanently separated from others.
verb
- To stop (fire, etc.) from burning; also, to stop (light, etc.) from shining; to put out, to quench.
- To kill (someone).
- To put an end to (something) completely; to annihilate, to destroy.
- To cause (an animal or plant species) to die out completely or become extinct (adjective etymology 1 sense 2.3).
- To suppress (something, as feelings, a person's spirit, a state of affairs, etc.); to quench.
- To abolish or make void (a law, a legal right, etc.); also, to cancel (a creditor's claim, a license, etc.).
noun
- Synonym of extinction (“the action of becoming or making extinct; annihilation”).
Etymology
From Late Middle English extinct (“eliminated, eradicated, extinguished”), from Latin extīnctus, exstīnctus (“extinguished, quenched; destroyed, killed; made extinct”), the perfect passive participles of extinguō, exstinguō (“to extinguish, put out, quench; (figurative) to abolish; to destroy, kill”), from ex- (prefix meaning ‘away; out’) + stinguō (“to extinguish, put out, quench”) (from…
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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.