expunge
in a sentence

In our state, you cannot expunge a conviction for most Class A and Class B felonies.
expunge = completely remove (the record of)

It lurks beneath the surface of the water, expunging any sense of its presence. (source) Haruki Murakami, After Dark, 2004
expunging = removing completely

If she doesn't get into any more trouble, it'll be expunged from her record. (source) Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song, 2009
expunged = removed completely

And so, slipping his sister's scissors into his pocket, the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever.† (source)

She felt obliterated, expunged from the room, and was relieved.† (source) Ian McEwan, Atonement, 2001

Père Lafontant had bribed a Haitian army colonel to expunge Farmer's name from the list.† (source)

Whatever affection your mother once had for Morzan had vanished by then, expunged by his cruel treatment of her and their newborn child, Murtagh.† (source) Christopher Paolini, Brisingr, 2008

Once divorced, twice expelled from school, once fled from same, many times estranged from parents, thrice charged with petty larceny, once emergency-roomed for barbiturate overdose, once experimentally wrist-slashed, many times avomit on the pavement outside a bar—the shoplifting charges expunged from the record thanks to influential friends of dad.† (source) Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997

Bachelli was lost in the memory of boarding his troop ship in Naples in 1934; he was a young officer again in the 230th Legion of the National Fascist Militia, off to fight for Il Duce, off to capture Abyssinia, off to expunge the shame of being defeated at the battle of Adowa by Emperor Menelik in 1896.† (source)

show 21 more with this conextual meaning

There were moments in the Far East when he had craved his own death, if only to expunge the guilt he felt at putting her in such dangerous-untenable?† (source)

The story goes on to say that Bobby Kennedy appealed to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to expunge those records.† (source)

But the Virginia Legislature, dominated by Jackson's friends and Tyler's foes, and influenced by the sentimental feeling that the President should be permitted to retire without this permanent blot on his record, instructed its Senators to support the expunging resolution.† (source)

(CAYLEY, HENSON, LILLIENTHAL, CHANUTE, LANGLEY, WRIGHT, TURNBUL AND S&ERSON) EXPUNGE.† (source) Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man, 1953

I cleaned up my Facebook account, but forgot to expunge some of the things friends had written on my wall.

The man expunged a throated wail; the weapon was withdrawn, the barrel now pressed into his cheek.† (source)

Oreale expunged a lungful of air, his face ashen as he stared at the weapon.† (source)

She could hear echoes of what Miss Milhouse had told her back in the fall when she wouldn't get up in the morning: Really, Miss Wellington, you must expunge yourself of this torpor.† (source)

He did so once or twice an hour, if only to clear his mind and expunge the empty insanities he had been required to mouth during the past minutes.† (source)

When Andrew Jackson's personal and political popularity brought increased support for Senator Benton's long-pending measure to expunge from the Senate Journal the resolution censuring Jackson for his unauthorized actions against the Bank of the United States, Senator John Tyler of Virginia, convinced that mutilation of the Journal was unconstitutional and unworthy of the Senate, stood his ground.† (source)

…her interminable games of patience (and though it must have plunged her in despair from the first moment of its realisation, from the first of those little unforeseen facts, the first word of calamitous news, whose accents can never afterwards be expunged from the memory, everything that bears upon it the imprint of actual, physical death, so terribly different from the logical abstraction of its possibility) she would fall back from time to time, to add an interest to her life, upon…† (source) Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913

Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness—and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh…† (source) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

The sober decency, earnestness and authority of their declaration of the real purpose of marriage will be honored and accepted, whilst their romantic vowings and pledgings and until-death-do-us-partings and the like will be expunged as unbearable frivolities.† (source)

Whilst the English seem disposed carefully to retain the bloody traces of the dark ages in their penal legislation, the Americans have almost expunged capital punishment from their codes.† (source)

Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison, a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.† (source)

…successively all the pieces of its armor, its luxury of torment, its penalty of imagination and fancy, its torture for which it reconstructed every five years a leather bed at the Grand Châtelet, that ancient suzerain of feudal society almost expunged from our laws and our cities, hunted from code to code, chased from place to place, has no longer, in our immense Paris, any more than a dishonored corner of the Grève,—than a miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, shameful, which seems…† (source)

Thus I expunge certain stains, and erase old defilements; the woman who gave me a flag from the top of the Christmas tree; my accent; beatings and other tortures; the boasting boys; my father, a banker at Brisbane.† (source) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

In both English and High German, during their middle periods, all the terminal vowels degenerated to /e/—now sunk to the aforesaid neutral vowel in many German words, and expunged from English altogether.† (source)

[37] /Female/, of course, was epidemic in England too, but White says that it was "not a Briticism," and so early as 1839 the Legislature of Maryland expunged it from the title of a bill "to protect the reputation of unmarried /females/," substituting /women/, on the ground that /female/ "was an Americanism in that application."† (source)

Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide; First strip off all her equipage of pride; Deduct what is but vanity or dress, Or learning's luxury, or idleness; Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain, Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain; Expunge the whole, or lop th' excrescent parts Of all our vices have created arts; Then see how little the remaining sum, Which served the past, and must the times to come!† (source)

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expungein a sentence