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purge

verb · noun

Simple meaning

Excrete or evacuate.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

purj
US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈpɝdʒ

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

verb

  1. Rinse, clean, or empty with a liquid

  2. transitive

    To clean thoroughly; to rid of impurities; to cleanse.

  3. transitive

    To remove by cleansing; to wash away.

  4. Excrete or evacuate (someone's bowels or body)

    “The doctor decided that the patient must be purged.”

  5. Make pure or free from sin or guilt

  6. transitive

    To forcibly remove, for example, from political activity.

noun

  1. An act or instance of purging.

  2. Something which or someone who purges; especially, a medicine that evacuates the intestines; a cathartic.

  3. A forcible removal of people, for example, from political activity.

  4. An act of removing by cleansing; ridding of sediment or other undesired elements

  5. An act or instance of the cleansing of pipes.

  6. A red or reddish liquid that seeps out from raw muscular meat consisting mostly of water and protein; "meat juice".

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
C1 · Advanced
Frequency
Uncommon
Typical Use
Neutral / general English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: Excrete or evacuate (someone's bowels or body)

Used this way, purge is a common word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Heard in a sentence
“The doctor decided that the patient must be purged.”
Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Common
Connotation
No strong connotation
Usage feel
Neutral and straightforward

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

Forcibly

party purge

Remove

purge away

Excrete

blood purge

Other combinations

saline purge

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Inflected forms

Grammatical variations of the same word.

  • purgingnounInflected form

    An act of removing by cleansing.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • purging cassianounCompound term

    Deciduous or semi-evergreen tree having scented sepia to yellow flowers in drooping racemes and pods whose pulp is used medicinally.

  • binge-purge syndromenounCompound term

    A disorder of eating in which the person alternates between strong craving for food and aversion to food.

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.