displace

verb

Saydis-PLAYS/dɪsˈpleɪs/

6 meanings of displace

1
verbtransitive
To move something or someone from its place, especially to force people to leave their homeland.
Decades of conflict have displaced more than two million people across the region.
Rising sea levels could displace entire coastal communities within a generation.
Similaruproot, expel, evict, exile, oust
Oppositeresettle, repatriate
Note
News reporting puts this sense in the passive or in a bare past participle: "Thousands displaced as ethnic clashes grip north-eastern state," ran a headline about Manipur in 2023. That construction makes the people moved the subject and leaves whoever moved them unsaid. When you want to name the cause, switch to the active, as in "the clashes displaced thousands."
2
verbtransitive
To take the place of something or someone; to push aside and substitute for what was there before.
Cheaper imports can displace local products from the shelves.
Email has largely displaced the handwritten letter in everyday business.
Similarreplace, supplant, supersede, oust, usurp
3
verbtransitive
To move something out of its proper position; to disarrange.
A careless nudge can displace the delicate instruments on the tray.
The surgeon worried that the impact had displaced the broken bone.
Similardislodge, shift, move, dislocate, disturb
Note
The literal sense, and the root of all the rest: Middle French desplacer, modern French déplacer, built on the word for place with a prefix of undoing. It concerns position rather than journey: a bone or an instrument knocked out of where it belongs. By contrast, the uprooting of people carries the idea of being sent away.
4
verbtransitive
To take the place of something else by being better suited or more capable than what was there before.
More efficient designs gradually displace those that waste energy.
The faster algorithm displaced its predecessor across the industry.
Similarsupersede, supplant, replace, eclipse, overtake
Note
Here the replacement carries a verdict: the newcomer wins because it is better. Its natural subjects are technologies and methods: electronic calculators over mechanical ones, or, in Cecil J. Allen's British Locomotive Practice and Performance (1950), "the all-conquering diesel" over steam. The object is the thing superseded, often with soon or gradually. Where the neutral "supplant" sense only reports a substitution, this one implies progress.
5
verbtransitive
To have a weight equal to that of the water pushed aside by a floating vessel.
The aircraft carrier displaces nearly one hundred thousand tons when fully loaded.
Modern submarines displace far more water when submerged than on the surface.
Similarweigh
Note
Said of a floating ship, and the grammar is unusual. The subject is the vessel, but the object is a weight rather than the water itself: a ship displaces so many tons. The figure states the ship's own weight by way of the water it pushes aside, so a carrier that "displaces a hundred thousand tons" weighs that much.
6
verbtransitive
To hold back or push an uncomfortable emotion or impulse out of conscious thought; to repress it.
Therapists note that children often displace fears they cannot put into words.
She had displaced the trauma so completely that she recalled almost nothing.
Similarrepress, suppress, bury, block
Oppositeexpress, confront, acknowledge
Note
A term from psychoanalytic theory, naming one of the mind's defenses against anxiety: a distressing wish, memory or impulse is kept out of conscious awareness. It often appears as a participle adjective. Megan Garber, writing in The Atlantic in 2017, reports that Freud saw shyness as evidence of "displaced narcissism." Outside clinical writing, repress is the plainer word.

Practice

Can you tell the meanings of displace apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.

Origin

From Middle French desplacer, which in modern French is déplacer.