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supplant

UK/səˈplɑːnt/US/səˈplænt/
verbC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,582 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: supplanted, supplanting, supplants

To supplant is to take over somebody's place, often by force. Supplant the leader, supplanted by the new method, supplant him entirely.

It is nearly always passive and implies replacing rather than merely following, which is why it is used of technologies as much as of people. The Latin means to trip up, from the word for the sole of the foot.

Definitions of supplant

  1. 1verbsupplantTo take over somebody's place, often by force.C1

    “Streaming has largely supplanted DVDs as the way people watch films at home.”

supplant is a replacing.

Where it comes from

Latin supplantare means to trip up, from sub plus planta, the sole of the foot.

  1. Latin

    supplantō — trip up

  2. Old French

    supplanter

  3. Middle English

    supplanten

  4. English, today

    supplant

Built from

  • sub · Latin — from below, under
  • planta · Latin — sole

From Middle English supplanten, supplaunten, from Old French supplanter, from Latin supplantō (“trip up”), from sub (“from below, under”) + planta (“sole”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

supplant in the wild

  • Earlier in the label's history, it was used to supplant its sister label Oxford Records.

    Silvertone Records (1916)

  • The letter raised the possibility that machines were a kind of "mechanical life" undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species.

    Darwin among the Machines

  • The Labour Party was aiming to supplant the Liberal Democrats as the largest party on the council.

    2011 Cannock Chase District Council election

  • The FIM was developed as a candidate to eventually supplant the Global Forecast System, the United States's current medium-range forecast model.

    Flow-following, finite-volume Icosahedral Model

  • The movement does not aim to supplant national languages but merely to supplement them.

    Esperanto movement

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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.