efface

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

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

Frankly, to efface all cartographic memorials to racism in Alexandria would require changing the name of the city itself.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 17, 2023

Even his too-muchness, though, had its source in a rich and vivid queer identity he alternately skirted, trumpeted and refuted but could never successfully efface.

From New York Times ● May 11, 2020

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

It was as though Mona had once been marked, but had since chosen to efface the symbol—or to erase it.

From "Huntress" by Malinda Lo

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

In a compassionate but nuanced telling, the novel effectively effaces assumptions of superiority and inferiority, good and bad.

From New York Times ● Aug. 5, 2021

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

Nay, more, when he read a long letter from Antipater, full of accusations against her, 'Antipater,' he said, 'does not know that one tear of a mother effaces a thousand such letters as these.'

From Greek Women by Mitchell Carroll

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

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

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

While the channel has protected the city from major flooding, it has also worsened the effects of segregation, and so effaced the river that many Angelenos might no longer know it was ever there.

From New York Times ● Nov. 10, 2022

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