Definition

To annihilate means to completely destroy or obliterate something or someone, leaving no trace or remnants behind.

Pronunciation

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Excerpts from News Articles

Mitzi Rapkins: What I got out of this collection, Above Ground, was this holiness, this succulence about life and the awe but also alongside the pain and the possibility of annihilation , all kind of happening together at once. I got this sense that maybe you even had a moment, like a sublime transcendent moment, watching cicadas. And I don’t know if that’s what brought this all together, but I am just curious about your reaction to my read.

Logo 2023-04-03 Literary Hub

But Foulds knows that skill isn’t the only ingredient in sport. ‘Longer matches are good because they allow character to show through. Who’s going to hold their nerve, who’s going to get over the line?’ Did he prefer these matches as a player? ‘Generally, yes – you knew you could recover from a bad start. Unless you were playing Steve [Davis], that is. You knew he’d annihilate you, so you’d want to play him over ten minutes.’

Logo 2023-04-05 The Spectator

The central thesis of Andreas Malm’s manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire is that peaceful protests have proven themselves ineffective in stopping the widespread annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants by climate change. The book, published by Verso Books in 2021, explains that the only available option is to take more radical action, not against people but against the infrastructure that is the source of this danger.

Logo 2023-04-07 Literary Hub

Key targets would include infrastructure such as runways, military logistics facilities and mobile targets "to annihilate them in one fell swoop if necessary", the report cited Zhao as saying.

Logo 2023-04-08 Reuters

The key targets include infrastructure like military logistics facilities and mobile targets “to annihilate them in one fell swoop if necessary”, said the Global Times report.

Logo 2023-04-09 The Independent

Second, both Lincoln and Darwin practiced the habit, at times exasperating to their admirers, of sympathetic summary. The ability to enter into an opponent’s argument without contempt or sarcastic bitterness was common to them both. Darwin did not merely articulate his opponents’ arguments against evolution; in every case he anticipated them and refuted them in advance. This is not merely instrumental, or a sign of softness—Lincoln went to war; Darwin annihilated a thousand years of biblical literalism—but it is a sign of sureness and part of the liberal inheritance.


Arms races can sometimes be stabilising. The United States and the Soviet Union built massive nuclear arsenals during the Cold War. Yet, the risk of mutual annihilation these created ultimately stopped Moscow and Washington from crossing the Rubicon – notwithstanding some very close calls along the way, such as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Logo 2023-04-10 Asia News Network

“Has it changed fast enough, have we essentially annihilated caste as Ambedkar had sought? Clearly not,” he says.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Independent

Except that in 1952 Britain exploded its first atomic bomb, in a nuclear test off the coast of western Australia, and in the same year America exploded its first hydrogen bomb. Albert Einstein warned that ‘successful radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and hence annihilation of any life on Earth has been brought within the realm of technical possibilities’. Churchill commissioned the Strath Report on what would happen to Britain in the event of a nuclear attack, and its conclusions were grim: ‘Life and property would be obliterated by blast and fire on a vast scale… No part of the country would be free from the risk of radioactive contamination.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Spectator

In “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” Aster meticulously peels back the ostensibly ordinary surface of the world, its patina of normalcy, to reveal the annihilating malevolence beneath it. By contrast, all the icky, nasty stuff is right out in the open in “Beau Is Afraid,” which over three long, eventful hours tracks its protagonist as he struggles to visit his mother, a pop-Freudian gargoyle named Mona (Patti LuPone, ferocious and amusingly outsized).

Logo 2023-04-12 The New York Times

You know, Carl Schmitt defined such a notion as an “absolute enemy.” This is an enemy with whom you can’t negotiate, since he has only one goal: total annihilation . Not necessarily physical annihilation , but primarily the destruction of self-identity.

Logo 2023-04-14 RT News

“They even use the symbol of the holy trinity.” On Russian talk shows, priests rail against the eviction of the monks from Pechersk Lavra and vow to annihilate the OCU .

Logo 2023-04-15 The Economist

Myanmar’s military leaders have vowed to annihilate resistance groups. Yet there are reasons to believe that the resistance is only getting stronger.

Logo 2023-04-15 The Conversation

“How can that be true, and this is such an incredibly dangerous platform that you have to annihilate it immediately and that’s going to save America?” Spehar said in an interview. “And we’re not looking at extending those protections across all social media platforms, across all banks, across all digital places where you put your digital information. It doesn’t make sense, which causes a lot of frustration.”

Logo 2023-04-16 The Washington Post

Uldarov said in the cities of Soledar and Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, Wagner mercenaries “were given the command to annihilate everyone.”

Logo 2023-04-17 CNN News

“I think that this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” he said.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Washington Post

He said TruthGPT "might be the best path to safety" that would be "unlikely to annihilate humans".

Logo 2023-04-17 Reuters

That’s a fast-track to World War III. Maintaining the fiction that Taiwan is a renegade province of China is a small price to pay for avoiding nuclear annihilation .

Logo 2023-04-17 The Washington Post

Uldarov said in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Soledar and Bakhmut – which have seen some of the fiercest fighting – Wagner mercenaries “were given the command to annihilate everyone.”

Logo 2023-04-17 CNN News

The new technology would ostensibly compete with similar efforts by Sam Altman-led OpenAI, which was initially funded by Musk, Google's DeepMind and other AI initiatives around the world. "I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe," Musk said on the show. Musk added that he is worried that current AI technology is "being trained to be politically correct, which is simply another way of .

Logo 2023-04-18 CNBC

"And I think this might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, it is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe," he said, according to some excerpts of the interview.

Logo 2023-04-18 Channel NewsAsia

In an interview on Monday with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Twitter chief said the AI will try to “understand the nature of the universe” and might be the “best path to safety” as it is “unlikely to annihilate humans”.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Independent

In the Fox interview, for example, Musk warns of AI robots obtaining human-like characteristics, and he and Carlson fret over the potential for soon-to-be-developed AI robots to " annihilate humans."

Logo 2023-04-18 MSNBC News

Putin issued a particularly dramatic warning about nuclear war at a forum later in 2018. Repeating his usual line about how he would only use nuclear weapons upon learning of an attack on Russia, he continued, according to a Moscow Times translation, “An aggressor should know that vengeance is inevitable, that he will be annihilated , and we would be the victims of the aggression. We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will just drop dead. They will not even have time to repent for this.”

Logo 2023-04-18 CNN News

In other AI-related news... Elon Musk claims he wants to build a large language model dubbed TruthGPT to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, spilling the beans in an interview with, uh, Fox News. TruthGPT would be a "maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe," he told Tucker Carlson. "And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe."

Logo 2023-04-18 The Register

"I'm definitely starting late, but I will try to create a third option," Musk said. "This might be the best path to safety, in that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans, because we are an interesting part of the universe."

Logo 2023-04-19 CNBC

“This might be the best path to [AI] safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk explained. That’s why Musk advocates for a competitor to ChatGPT that would lack its speech restrictions and safety controls — the hypothetical “based AI” he proposed last month.

Logo 2023-04-19 Politico

From terrorist communiqués to official statements and letters written by Moro during his captivity, Esterno Notte exposes a tale of vengeful escalation in merciless detail. Each side intends to fight its corner at all costs, without compromise. The Red Brigades, a far-left terrorist organisation founded in the early 1970s that took up “armed propaganda” in the name of the workers’ movement, are strengthened hour by hour in their vengeful resolve, just as the Italian authorities are strengthened in their resolve to annihilate them.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Conversation

As part of the Nazis’ plans to annihilate the Jewish people, they created ghettos, forcing thousands of Jews into small, cramped parts of major cities and limited access to food and supplies. The Warsaw Ghetto, bound by a 10-foot wall and barbed wire, was the largest — sealing 400,000 Jews inside its 1.3 square mile area by 1942, according to the United States Holocaust Museum.

Logo 2023-04-20 CNN News

Where they momentarily lost and regained their sense of purpose. Where they all stood in silent disbelief, a light drizzle on the window ticking off each annihilating second, staring into the tiny bathroom. Where the children were packed in so tightly that the inward-hinged door could not be shut all the way.

Logo 2023-04-20 The New York Times

But for both of us, our immediate takeaway was one of defiance – that our mere existence is proof that Hitler did not succeed in his quest to annihilate our family just because we are Jews.

Logo 2023-04-21 CNN News

South Koreans are understandably worried and wonder if they can still count on the United States to defend them if, by doing so, it would put U.S. cities at risk of nuclear annihilation . Koreans are concerned that their country could meet the same fate as Ukraine — another nonnuclear state attacked by a nuclear-armed neighbor.

Logo 2023-04-24 The Washington Post

An Honourable Exit is a logical successor to Éric Vuillard’s much longer and more luxuriant Conquistadors (not yet translated into English), which recounts the annihilation of the Incan empire, and his Goncourt Prize-winning The Order of the Day, on the captains of industry who smoothed the path of Hitler and whose companies prosper to this day. His new novel of greed and catastrophe is an entrancingly nightmarish analysis of the First Indochina War and the motivations of its principal actors.

Logo 2023-04-25 The Spectator

Only the broadcasting over the Tannoy of McBurney’s six-year-old daughter asking naive questions about why the birdies are flying away struck a needlessly sentimental note: the tragedy in the annihilation of these exquisite creatures had been more poetically rendered in Pite’s delicately imaginative choreography. Much more abrasively effective is the brash intrusion of a climate-change denier, blaming it all on God and bleating about the loss of his personal liberties – a figure wittily characterised by Pite as a hyperactive attention-craving jester, attended by a pair of idiotically cavorting rabbits.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Spectator

In October, a force of more than 1,000 British loyalists is annihilated at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Washington sends more men to the south where they unite with Patriot militia fighters. Daniel Morgan leads the Americans to a major victory at Cowpens. But years of campaigning forced him to retire. Nathaniel Greene takes over.