efface

"You may have the power to bring down the government. But you cannot efface reality," he said.

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

It’s exceedingly unlikely that Leo had anything to do with her murder, but the show doesn’t efface her tragedy, even as it reckons with the gravity of Leo’s.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 20, 2025

Clichés like these efface the complications of real relationships.

From New York Times ● Apr. 21, 2020

But some feel privileging an object’s “universal” value can efface the particular history in which it is inscribed, as well as the experiences of the individuals who made it.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 8, 2018

Without regrets she honored the obligation she felt to him and was happy to efface herself.

From "Snow Falling on Cedars: A Novel" by David Guterson

His celebrated merchant posters, made from local advertisements that he salvages from his neighborhood and then effaces so that multiple layers surface simultaneously, tell a history of predation via something as commonplace as payday-loan advertisements.

From New York Times ● Apr. 19, 2023

But some may feel that the warm welcome Omar receives from the enslaved workers at Owen’s plantation effaces the harsher reality of the character’s circumstance.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 23, 2022

Indeed, each film effaces the collective aspects of the assassination research by presenting the historiographic challenges of the period as essentially the work of one man.

From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2017

It’s an enormous story, one that, in the telling, nearly effaces Wilkerson’s presence onstage.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 8, 2017

The bourgeois effaces the knight; the Italian of the Renaissance has broken the leading strings of mystical romance.

From Renaissance in Italy: Italian Literature Part 1 (of 2) by Symonds, John Addington

Such weird scenes inside this once-mysterious world have been totally effaced, now that every musician can curate his own image on social media.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 27, 2025

But that timing dates back to when broadcast television dominated — both in viewership and Emmys contenders — in a way that has been effaced by cable television and streaming services.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 10, 2023

The tower was locked and the mural effaced.

From Slate ● Oct. 28, 2022

And the shutdown is also an opening to acknowledge society's dependence on care giving labor and confront the ways this work — in families, schools, retirement communities — has been disparaged, effaced and desperately under-compensated.

From Salon ● May 29, 2021

João de Barros was able to claim in 1555 that Hercules’ pillars, ‘which he set up at our very doorstep, as it were,...have been effaced from human memory and thrust into silence and oblivion’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Adolfo became an expert at effacing the most stubborn stains.

From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 2023

Classical realism is sometimes accused of effacing its own literary labor; the cost of Tokarczuk’s flâneurial freedom is that it effaces the labor of travel.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 24, 2018

Apart from all this, maybe the most potent force effacing gay culture is an understandable, if still covert, impulse to jettison the trauma of the queer legacy.

From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2018

A versatile stage veteran best known for her Emmy-winning performance as Jackie on “Roseanne,” Metcalf has the ability to fully inhabit a comic universe without effacing more difficult human truth.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 27, 2017

Then I saw a shadow flit across her face, and she drew back against the wall, effacing herself, as a step sounded outside and Maxim came into the room.

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier