Definition of "depopulate"

Where is this viperThat would depopulate the city andBe every man himself?

c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene i]

So two young Mountain Lions, nurs’d with BloodIn deep Recesses of the gloomy Wood,Rush fearless to the Plains, and uncontroul’dDepopulate the Stalls and waste the Fold;

1715–1720, Homer, [Alexander] Pope, transl., “Book 5”, in The Iliad of Homer, volumes (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott […], page 48, lines 681-685

There are uſually reckoned twelve of theſe Iſlands ; but it will appear, from the chart of the North part of the Pacific Ocean hereafter inſerted, that if the ſmall iſlets and rocks are counted in, then their whole number will amount to above twenty. They were formerly moſt of them well inhabited ; and, even not ſixty years ago, the three principal Iſlands, Guam, Rota, and Tinian together, are ſaid to have contained above fifty thouſand people : But ſince that time Tinian hath been entirely depopulated ; and only two or three hundred Indians have been left at Rota, to cultivate rice for the Iſland of Guam ; ſo that now no more than Guam can properly be ſaid to be inhabited. This Iſland of Guam is the only ſettlement of the Spaniards ; here they keep a governor and garriſon, and here the Manila ſhip generally touches for refreſhment, in her paſſage from Acapulco to the Philippines.

1748, Richard Walter, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV. by George Anson, Eſq; Commander in Chief of a Squadron of His Majeſty's Ships, ſent upon an Expedition to the South-Seas.‎, London: J. and P. Knapton, pages 337–338

The agricultural modernization of the 1950s and 1960s, the migration of the sons and daughters of peasants to the cities, had been steadily depleting and depopulating the French countryside.

2005, Tony Judt, chapter 17, in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, New York: Penguin, page 548

[…] the country […] has been rapidly depopulating, and utterly draining of its vital resources, till the unhappy population have sunk to the lowest depth of misery.

1849, William Henry Bartlett, chapter 1, in The Nile Boat; or, Glimpses of the Land of Egypt‎, London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co, page 29

[…] on the 2d of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into disaffected and depopulating Paris.

1917, Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems of François Villon‎, Boston: John W. Luce, Critical Biography, page 1

Rural Canada was depopulating and immigrants were needed.

1994, Kenneth Coward: The Welfare: A Concise Archival History of Social Services, Owen Sound, Ontario, Appendix III, p. 56

Visitors dwindled over time. […] My world shrank as it depopulated. It became my room, the front room, and the kitchen.

2008, Gary Presley, chapter 15, in Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio‎, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, page 80

A world it was to see […] his daily peregrinacion in the desert, felles and craggy mountains of that bareine vnfertile and depopulate countrey.

1548, Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke‎, London: Richard Grafton, The firste yere of The vnquiete tyme of Kyng Henry the fourthe, page xix

Wroth for bright-cheekt Bryseis losse; whom from Lyrnessus spoiles,(His owne exploit) he brought away, as trophee of his toiles,When that town was depopulate;

c. 1611, George Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets‎, London: Nathaniell Butter, Book Two, p. 30