depopulate

verb

1. (transitive)To reduce the population of a region by disease, war, forced relocation etc.

   “Where is this viper That would depopulate the city and Be every man himself?”

   “So two young Mountain Lions, nurs’d with Blood In deep Recesses of the gloomy Wood, Rush fearless to the Plains, and uncontroul’d Depopulate the Stalls and waste the Fold;”

   “The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside.”

2. (transitive)To remove the components from a circuit board.
3. (intransitive)To become depopulated, to lose its population.

   “[…] the country […] has been rapidly depopulating, and utterly draining of its vital resources, till the unhappy population have sunk to the lowest depth of misery.”

   “[…] on the 2d of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into disaffected and depopulating Paris.”

   “Rural Canada was depopulating and immigrants were needed.”

   “Visitors dwindled over time. […] My world shrank as it depopulated. It became my room, the front room, and the kitchen.”

adj

1. (not-comparable, obsolete)Depopulated (sense 1).

   “And ſo in that realme were continually two kynges, vntil the kynge of Mede had depopulate the country, and brought the people in captiuite to the citie of Babylon: […]”

2. (not-comparable, obsolete)Barren, devoid of inhabitants; utterly destroyed, devastated .

   “A world it was to see […] his daily peregrinacion in the desert, felles and craggy mountains of that bareine vnfertile and depopulate countrey.”

   “Wroth for bright-cheekt Bryseis losse; whom from Lyrnessus spoiles, (His owne exploit) he brought away, as trophee of his toiles, When that town was depopulate;”