discard

Formsdiscards, discarding, discarded

Pluraldiscards

1. 1
   verbtransitive

   To throw something away or reject it as useless or unwanted.

   The factory discards any parts that fail inspection.

   Editors often discard entire drafts before settling on a final version.

   Similardump, toss, scrap, ditch, trash

   Oppositekeep, retain, save

   Note

   The card is right there in the word: dis- plus card, with Spanish descartar as a cousin, picturing a card thrown out of a hand. The card-table sense keeps that literal image. Here the verb widens to anything set aside, abstract things included. Isaac Taylor's Saturday Evening (1832) has a man who discards the follies of boyhood. Like jettison and cast aside, it implies something once held and now let go.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Something thrown out or rejected as useless or no longer wanted.

   Most of the discards ended up in the recycling bin.

   He treated the worn jacket as a discard and gave it away.

   Similarcastoff, reject, throwaway

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A playing card thrown out or set aside by a player during a card game.

   A clever player watches every discard for clues about an opponent's hand.

   The discards stacked up face-up beside the deck.

4. 4
   verbintransitive

   To throw out a card from one's hand during play, making a discard.

   If you cannot meld, you must discard before play passes on.

   She discarded, and the next player immediately drew.

   Note

   Card players often use this verb with no object: on your turn you draw, then you discard, and the card goes onto the pile. In many games the move exists to bring the hand back to a fixed size after drawing. Name the card and the verb turns transitive again (discard the seven). The card itself is the noun for a thrown-out card.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To dismiss someone from a job, or to cast them out of one's trust or favor.

   He felt the team had discarded him once his usefulness faded.

   Powerful patrons can discard a protégé the instant scandal appears.

   Similarfire, dismiss, sack, discharge, terminate

   Oppositehire, retain

   Note

   Here the card-table word is turned on people. Discard is built from dis- + card, so to discard an ally is to drop them from one's hand like a card thrown out in play. Swift uses it this way in The Conduct of the Allies (1711), of a queen whose patience with her favorites has run out. Fire and sack belong to the workplace, but discard keeps the sense of someone used and then set aside.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   In programming, a throwaway variable that takes in an unwanted value and cannot be read afterward.

   Like a sealed drop box: values go in, but there is no way to get them back.

   She assigned the unused result to a discard rather than giving it a name.

   Pattern matching lets you route fields you don't need into discards.

   Note

   A programmer's placeholder for values nobody needs. Andrew Troelsen and Philip Japikse's Pro C# 7 (2017) uses discards with out parameters, tuples and pattern matching, or on their own. Usually written as an underscore, a discard tells anyone reading the code that the value is ignored on purpose. Because it can never be referenced afterward, it also silences unused-variable warnings.

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