Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Expropriate \Ex*pro"pri*ate\, v. t. [L. ex out, from + proprius
one's own: cf. F. exproprier.]
To put out of one's possession; to surrender the ownership
of; also, to deprive of possession or proprietary rights.
--Boyle.
Expropriate these [bad landlords] as the monks were
expropriated by Act of Parliament.
--M. Arnold.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1610s, back-formation from expropriation, or from earlier adjective (mid-15c.), or from Medieval Latin expropriatus, past participle of expropriare "to deprive of one's own." Related: Expropriated; expropriating.
Wiktionary
vb. To deprive a person of their private property for public use.
WordNet
v. deprive of possessions; "The Communist government expropriated the landowners"
Usage examples of "expropriate".
The question was to be settled by a plebiscite of the people, in accordance with the Weimar Constitution, Strasser and Goebbels proposed that the Nazi Party jump into the fray with the Communists and the Socialists and support the campaign to expropriate the nobles.
It must be particularly emphasized that small properties will in no way be expropriated and that small property owners who are not exploiters of labor will not be forcibly dispossessed.
Simply in the interest of efficiency the Nazis found themselves expropriating, nationalizing, destroying the very people they had set out to save.
Hawkril and Craer carried the corpses to the deepest part of the ditch, the procurer busily expropriating purses and serviceable-looking knives and daggers as they worked.
It also expropriates the book from the realm of passive, inert objects and transforms it into a catalyst of human interactions across time and space.
Simply in the interest of efficiency the Nazis found themselves expropriating, nationalizing, destroying the very people they had set out to save.
I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan's pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth—I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters—I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who'd acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs.
You declare to your children that it is rational to loot, to torture, to enslave, to expropriate, to murder, but that they must resist the temptations of logic and stick to the discipline of remaining irrational—that skyscrapers, factories, radios, airplanes were the products of faith and mystic intuition, while famines, concentration camps and firing squads are the products of a reasonable manner of existence—that the industrial revolution was the revolt of the men of faith against that era of reason and logic which is known as the Middle Ages.
To send him to the Hunt would have meant more feral activity, more sabotage, more throats cut, more hydrofluoric acid thrown over Heroes in city alleyways at night, and more humans killed in reprisals, too, more human land expropriated.