All 5 Uses of
obliterate
in
The House of the Seven Gables
- It was a death that blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men.†
Chpt 1 *
- No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim, as it were, Phoebe's waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had been untenanted so long—except by spiders, and mice, and rats, and ghosts—that it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to obliterate every trace of man's happier hours.†
Chpt 5
- Mr. Pyncheon's long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and fashion,—courtiers, worldings, and free-thinkers,—had done much towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of New England birth at that early period could entirely escape.†
Chpt 13obliterating = doing away with completely
- Unaccustomed to action or responsibility,—full of horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to imagine, how it had come to pass,—affrighted at the fatality which seemed to pursue her brother,—stupefied by the dim, thick, stifling atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a death-smell, and obliterated all definiteness of thought,—she yielded without a question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed.†
Chpt 16obliterated = completely done away with
- As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the black stain on Clifford's character.†
Chpt 20obliterating = doing away with completely
Definition:
to completely destroy or wipe out so that nothing remains -- either physically or figuratively