The Collaborative International Dictionary
cannibalise \cannibalise\, cannibalize \cannibalize\v. i. to eat human flesh.
Syn: practice cannibalism.
cannibalise \cannibalise\, cannibalize \cannibalize\v. t. to use parts of (something, such as a machine), to repair something else.
Syn: use parts of.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context transitive English) To eat (parts of) another of one's own species. 2 (context transitive English) To remove parts of (a machine, etc) for use in other similar machines. 3 (context transitive business English) To reduce sales or market share (for one of your own products) by introducing another. 4 (rfdef: English)
WordNet
v. eat human flesh [syn: cannibalize]
use parts of something to repair something else [syn: cannibalize]
Usage examples of "cannibalise".
Fragments of them sometimes creep into stories, but writers cannibalise all of themselves for stories, and there is no reason that dreams should escape.
For another the stocky youth of the Revolution was now being impersonated by a fat, soft man with loose jowls and a concentrated fierce gaze, rather like that of a sow about to cannibalise her piglets.
I thought occasionally that I could eat better if I sold something, but I'd never get back what I'd paid for the skis, for instance, and it seemed stupid to cannibalise things that had given me pleasure.
The first twenty or so pages were taken up with pieces I recognised: articles and poems and the nameless play Rory had apparently decided to cannibalise for the end of Crow Road.
On Harlan's World, I'd been inside a couple of the original Konrad Harlan fleet, and even the decks had been cannibalised, carved back to multilevelled ridges of metal clinging to the inner curve of the hull.
Ameli Vongsavath was scanning for traces, but the current theory was that the nanobes cannibalised anything non-organic to build the next generation.
Because some of the parts are going to be put right back into the new sets, and what STAND ON ZANZIBAR 353 can't be cannibalised will be sold as precious - I repeat, precious - scrap.
Written over four months in the spring of 1934, he cannibalised and expanded a number of his earlier Conan stories - specifically `The Scarlet Citadel', `Black Colossus' and `The Devil in Iron' - to create one of his finest and most mature works.
It had gone up at the same time as the rest of the temporary buildings, in the winter of 1939 - a timber skeleton rising out of the freezing Buckinghamshire clay, clothed in a sheath of asbestos and flimsy wooden boarding - and to heat it, he remembered, they had cannibalised a big cast-iron stove from one of the Victorian greenhouses.
It cannibalised the genetic heritage of its victims, absorbing the data via an elaborate nanoscale assimilation engine.
The text thus becomes what science fiction always was—a means, not an end: an experiment that can be examined, taken apart, even cannibalised by ruthless commentators, rather than a seamless work of art.
The click and titter of the machines is fading as they enter sessile phase, cannibalising their own bodies to make the big underground placentories that will spawn the next generation of constructors tomorrow.