ablate
/əˈbleɪt/verb
ablate is a verb meaning “To remove or decrease something by cutting, erosion, melting, evaporation, or vaporization” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-B-L-A-T-E and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 35 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does ablate mean?
verb
- 1
To remove or decrease something by cutting, erosion, melting, evaporation, or vaporization.
- 2
To undergo ablation; to become melted or evaporated and removed at a high temperature.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce ablate?
- US /əˈbleɪt/
Ablate has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of ablate
- ablates present, singular, he/she/it
- ablating participle, present
- ablated participle, past
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is ablate?
Ablate appears about once in every 35 million words in written English, the 182,517th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does ablate come from?
From Middle English ablat (“taken away”), from Latin ablātus, past participle of auferō (“to remove”), see -ate (verb-forming suffix). First attested in the 1500s, it became obsolete by the early 1600s.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).