- abolish
- abolish, annihilate, extinguish, abate share the meaning to make nonexistent.Abolish seldom refers to purely physical objects but rather to such things as are the outgrowth of law, custom, human conception, or the conditions of human existence{
attempts to abolish slavery
}{a proposal to abolish the income tax
}{no plan will be acceptable unless it abolishes poverty— Shaw
}Annihilate distinctively implies destruction so complete that everything involved is wiped out of existence and cannot be revived in any form{the realization that for the first time the homes and cities of the United States itself can be annihilated by enemy attack— Crawley
}Extinguish or its related noun extinction is often interchangeable with annihilate (or annihilation) but it stresses the power of the cause to overwhelm and suppress rather than the finality of the result{a religion of their own which was thoroughly and painfully extinguished by the Inquisition— T. S. Eliot
}Abate in general use is far weaker in meaning than the foregoing terms and typically denotes a gradual decrease or dwindling rather than an immediate termination{the wind abated after sundown
}{misfortune had abated the grandiosity of the Roman temper— Buchan
}In law abolish keeps close to its general sense of to make nonexistent; annihilate is sometimes used as an emphatic substitute for abolish{the appointment cannot be annihilated— John Marshall
}Extinguish implies destruction of a right or obligation by some act or decision which nullifies it or makes it void.Abate implies termination especially by a legal decision{abate a nuisance
}{abate an action or writ
}{summoning me for failing to abate a smoky chimney— Wodehouse
}Analogous words:extirpate, eradicate, wipe, *exterminate: obliterate, efface, blot out, expunge (see ERASE): negate, *nullify, annul, abrogateAntonyms: establish
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
