efface

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

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

Clichés like these efface the complications of real relationships.

From New York Times ● Apr. 21, 2020

The wind that exposed the ancient buildings now promises to efface them altogether in a short time.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 3, 2019

Most essentially, “Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through,” not unlike Fleischmann’s first book “Syzygy, Beauty,” effaces lines of genre as a strategy to efface, or disrupt, lines of self and gender.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2019

They seemed very small, and they tried to efface themselves in outside neglect, and the wild overgrown front yards tried to hide them from the street.

From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck

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

Most essentially, “Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through,” not unlike Fleischmann’s first book “Syzygy, Beauty,” effaces lines of genre as a strategy to efface, or disrupt, lines of self and gender.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2019

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

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

Its general application "imparts a uniform tint to all buildings, fills up the architectural lines, effaces all their delicate ornamentation, and does not allow you to read their age."

From Southern Spain by A. F. (Albert Frederick) Calvert

If anything, I think he speaks to an aspect of Silicon Valley that maybe has been effaced more recently—it’s not our popular image of the industry today, where it’s something much more malign.

From Slate ● Aug. 15, 2025

The Eaton and Palisades fires effaced entire communities, destroyed thousands of homes and left more than two dozen dead.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 6, 2025

And while Fargeat is not very subtle showing Elisabeth literally being effaced from a billboard, illustrating this very point, the emotional toll is palpable.

From Salon ● Sep. 20, 2024

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

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

And thus, too, began his lifelong strategy of effacing himself from his work.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 29, 2021

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