Definition of "cancel"

cancel

/ˈkæn.sl̩/

verb
third-person singular simple present cancels, present participle cancelling or (US) canceling, simple past and past participle cancelled or (US) canceled
1. (transitive) To cross out something with lines etc.
  Quotations
  A deed may be avoided by delivering it up to be cancelled; that is, to have lines drawn over it in the form of latticework or cancelli; the phrase is now used figuratively for any manner of obliterating or defacing it.
  1765–1769, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (please specify |book=I to IV), Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press
2. (transitive) To invalidate or annul something.
  Quotations
  "I don't know what your agreement was, Herr Professor, but if it had money in it, cancel it. I want him to learn that lesson, too."
  1914, Marjorie Benton Cooke, Bambi
3. (transitive) To mark something (such as a used postage stamp) so that it can't be reused.
4. (transitive) To offset or equalize something.
5. (transitive, mathematics) To remove a common factor from both the numerator and denominator of a fraction, or from both sides of an equation.
6. (transitive, media) To stop production of a programme.
7. (printing, dated) To suppress or omit; to strike out, as matter in type.
8. (obsolete) To shut out, as with a railing or with latticework; to exclude.
  Quotations
  cancelled from heaven
  1667, John Milton, “Book VI”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], […]; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873,
9. (slang) To kill.
10. (transitive, neologism) To cease to provide financial or moral support to (someone deemed unacceptable). Compare cancel culture.
  Quotations
  Bill Gates is canceled. Gwen Stefani and Erykah Badu are canceled. Despite his relatively strong play in the World Cup, Cristiano Ronaldo has been canceled. Taylor Swift is canceled and Common is canceled and, Wednesday, Antoni Porowski, a “Queer Eye” fan favorite was also canceled. Needless to say, Kanye West is canceled, too.
  2018, Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times‎
  We Spoke to Joan Cornellá, the Artist Who Really Should Have Been Cancelled By Now
  2019, Christopher Hooton, VICE‎
  You may have never heard the term "cancel culture," but you certainly know some of the faces who have been canceled. Everyone from Cosby to Matt Lauer.
  2020 February 5, Russell Haythorn, “An explanation of ‘cancel culture’ and why it's become such a popular phenomenon”, in The Denver Channel‎
  To attempt to cancel the founding generation is an attempt to cancel our own freedoms.
  2020 July 3, Kristi Noem speech at Mount Rushmore transcribed by C-SPAN
noun
plural cancels
1. A cancellation (US); (nonstandard in some kinds of English).
  1. A control message posted to Usenet that serves to cancel a previously posted message.
2. (obsolete) An enclosure; a boundary; a limit.
  Quotations
  A prison is but a retirement, and opportunity of serious thoughts, to a person whose spirit […] desires no enlargement beyond the cancels of the body.
  1678, Antiquitates Christianæ: Or, the History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus: […], London: […] E. Flesher, and R. Norton, for R[ichard] Royston, […]
3. (printing) The suppression on striking out of matter in type, or of a printed page or pages.
4. (printing) The page thus suppressed.
5. (printing) The page that replaces it.

Definition of "cancel"

cancel

verb

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noun

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