efface

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

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

It’s exceedingly unlikely that Leo had anything to do with her murder, but the show doesn’t efface her tragedy, even as it reckons with the gravity of Leo’s.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 20, 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

She is told that she is still in early labor, three centimeters dilated, beginning to efface.

From "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri

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

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

And, while this is not a performance that effaces the memory of Antony Sher, Ian McKellen or Jonathan Slinger, it has its own insidious power.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 25, 2012

A. The seaside visit has a compensating advantage of overwhelming proportions, which completely swallows up and effaces all suggestions of discomfort—it is the fashion.

From Mr. Punch at the Seaside by Various

In “Oppenheimer,” the writer and director Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster biopic — three words that generally don’t go together — the character of Kitty Oppenheimer is effaced twice over.

From New York Times ● Jan. 1, 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

The tower was locked and the mural effaced.

From Slate ● Oct. 28, 2022

And the shutdown is also an opening to acknowledge society's dependence on care giving labor and confront the ways this work — in families, schools, retirement communities — has been disparaged, effaced and desperately under-compensated.

From Salon ● May 29, 2021

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

Adolfo became an expert at effacing the most stubborn stains.

From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 2023

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