depopulate

1. (transitive) To reduce the population of a region by disease, war, forced relocation etc.Examples: "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;"; "There are uſually reckoned twelve of theſe Iſlands ; but it will appear, from the chart of the North part of the Pacific Ocean hereafter inſerted, that if the ſmall iſlets and rocks are counted in, then their whole number will amount to above twenty. They were formerly moſt of them well inhabited ; and, even not ſixty years ago, the three principal Iſlands, Guam, Rota, and Tinian together, are ſaid to have contained above fifty thouſand people : But ſince that time Tinian hath been entirely depopulated ; and only two or three hundred Indians have been left at Rota, to cultivate rice for the Iſland of Guam ; ſo that now no more than Guam can properly be ſaid to be inhabited. This Iſland of Guam is the only ſettlement of the Spaniards ; here they keep a governor and garriſon, and here the Manila ſhip generally touches for refreſhment, in her paſſage from Acapulco to the Philippines."Synonyms: depeople, desolate, dispeople, unpeople, unpopulatetransitive

2. (transitive, electronics) To remove the components from a circuit board.transitive

3. (intransitive) To become depopulated, to lose its population.Examples: "[…] 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."intransitive