DEFEAT • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Defeat

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/dɪfˈit/ Listen

noun

Defeat n.

1.

An undoing or annulling; destruction. (Obs.) "Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made."

2.

Frustration by rendering null and void, or by prevention of success; as, the defeat of a plan or design.

3.

An overthrow, as of an army in battle; loss of a battle; repulse suffered; discomfiture; opposed to victory.

verb

Defeat v. t. (past & past part. defeated; pres. part. defeating)

1.

To undo; to disfigure; to destroy. (Obs.) "His unkindness may defeat my life."

2.

To render null and void, as a title; to frustrate, as hope; to deprive, as of an estate. "He finds himself naturally to dread a superior Being that can defeat all his designs, and disappoint all his hopes." "The escheators... defeated the right heir of his succession." "In one instance he defeated his own purpose."

3.

To overcome or vanquish, as an army; to check, disperse, or ruin by victory; to overthrow.

4.

To resist with success; as, to defeat an assault. "Sharp reasons to defeat the law."

Synonyms: To baffle; disappoint; frustrate.

See images of 'Defeat'

Etymology of 'Defeat'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Defeat" Quotes from Famous Books

... least recognize a progressive idea when they were beaten across the nose with it. He studied his trustee list now more purposefully than he had ever pored over his faculty line up. By the early spring, he was ready to set subtle influences going looking to the defeat of the insurgent five, including James E. Winter, whose term happily expired on ...

— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... colony must be at the waterfront. Every soul in the little town and men from miles around had turned out to welcome the returning vessel, for the news of Bonnet's defeat had been brought in, days before, by a Carolina coaster. There was bunting over doorways and cheering in the streets as the Governor's coach with the party of honor drove up the main thoroughfare to the ...

— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... the Reviewer admits, for the purpose of silencing objectors and doubters, Sadducees and Witch-advocates, before the meeting of the Court, by adjournment, in the first week of November, to continue—as the Ministers, in their Advice, expressed it—their "sedulous and assiduous endeavours to defeat the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in ...

— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... sacred historian leaves to the reader. I take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got up by the courtiers and friends of Saul, to prevent him, if possible, from hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings of defeat. Saul is not said to have seen Samuel; the woman only pretends to see him. And then what does this Samuel do? He merely repeats the prophecy known to all Israel, which the true Samuel had uttered some years before. Read Captain Lyon's account of ...

— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... in noisome places. Yet the poor mass of clay in the upper room that had burdened her so grievously—what was it, after all, but one of the ephemeral unrealities of life to be brushed aside? Decay, defeat, falling and groaning; disease, blind doctoring of disease; hunger and sorrow and sordid misery; the grime of living here in Chicago in the sharp discords of this nineteenth century; the brutal rich, the brutalized ...

— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com