defile
Pronunciation
  • IPA: /dɪˈfaɪl/
Verb

defile (defiles, present participle defiling; past and past participle defiled)

  1. (transitive) To make unclean, dirty, or impure; soil; befoul.
  2. (transitive) To vandalize or add inappropriate contents to something considered sacred or special; desecrate
    To urinate on someone's grave is an example of a way to defile it.
  3. (transitive) To deprive or ruin someone's (sexual) purity or chastity, often not consensually; stain; tarnish; mar; rape
    The serial rapist kidnapped and defiled a six-year-old girl.
Synonyms Antonyms Translations Translations Noun

defile (plural defiles)

  1. A narrow way or passage, e.g. between mountains.
    • , "Life of Nicias", tr. Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin, p. 239:
      The next morning the enemy were on the march before him, seized the defiles, blocked the fords of the rivers, destroyed the bridges, and sent out cavalry to patrol the open ground, so as to oppose the Athenians at every step as they retreated.
  2. A single file, such as of soldiers.
  3. The act of defilading a fortress, or of raising the exterior works in order to protect the interior.
Translations Translations Verb

defile (defiles, present participle defiling; past and past participle defiled)

  1. (archaic, intransitive) To march in a single file.
    • 1979, Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, Random House, p.138:
      They defiled down a gully to the water and bunched and jerked their noses at it and came back.
Translations
  • French: défiler
  • Russian: дефилировать
  • Spanish: desfilar



This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.004
Offline English dictionary