dispose

UK/dɪˈspəʊz/US/dɪsˈpoʊz/

verbC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,686 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: disposed, disposing, disposes

To dispose is to get rid of something. Dispose of the waste, dispose of the evidence, safely disposed of.

In this sense it must take of: you dispose of something rather than dispose it. On its own the verb means to arrange or to incline, which is where well disposed towards somebody comes from, and that sense is much older.

Definitions of dispose

1verbdisposeTo get rid of something.C1
“Please dispose of your rubbish in the bins provided.”

dispose is a getting rid.

Where it comes from

French
disposer
English, today
dispose

Borrowed from French disposer.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

dispose in the wild

Life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) is an economic analysis tool to determine the most cost-effective option to purchase, run, sustain or dispose of an object or process.
Life-cycle cost analysis
Precious or sacred items are disposed of, when possible, by returning them to the ground.
Piscina
One of his tasks was to dispose the troops on the battlefield.
Maréchal de camp
In object-oriented programming, the dispose pattern is a design pattern for resource management.
Dispose pattern
The dispose pattern is primarily used in languages whose runtime environment have automatic garbage collection (see motivation below).
Dispose pattern

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the disposer family

disposal dispose disposable

dispose — used about once every 1,054 pages · #4,686 · point at the bar for the others

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