Sterilize

Quick meaning: Sterilize is a verb meaning (transitive) To deprive of the ability to procreate.

Meaning

(transitive) To deprive of the ability to procreate.

More Meanings

1. (transitive) To make unable to produce; to make unprofitable.
2. (transitive) To redact (a document), removing classified or sensitive material.
3. (transitive, astronomy) To render a planet like Earth permanently uninhabitable to all life, including even microbes, causing their complete extinction.
4. (transitive, biology) To kill, deactivate (denature), or destroy (break apart) all living, viable microorganisms and spores on a surface, in a fluid, or contained in a compound, such as culture media or a medical product.

Example Sentences

The bottled juice must be heated to a temperature and for a time sufficient to attain a sterilizing temperature at the coolest point, usually the center of the bottle.

[…] (minus, of course, any information that might identify the agent and other operational personnel), or he might code it or "sterilize" it, and reward the foreign station chief in some other way.

If monogeny is determined exclusively by a cytoplasmic factor, then it is easy to see that the factor will either die out (if it causes arrhenogeny) or will become fixed and thereby sterilize the population (if it causes thelygeny).

One machine in which Mr. Taylor takes special pride is a salmon canner, which engulfs a whole salmon, decapitates and decaudates it, skins it, blows out its viscera, cuts it into pieces, deposits them in the can, sterilizes them […]

Word Forms

• sterilizes
• sterilizing
• sterilized
• sterilise

Synonyms for sterilize

Depending on context, synonyms include fix, unsex, desexualize, desex.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include fix, desex, desexualize, unsex, disinfection, disinfect.

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