cull

See also: çull and Cull

English

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation, US) IPA(key): /kʌl/
    • Audio (US):(file)
  • (Northern England) IPA(key): /kʊl/
  • Rhymes: -ʌl

Etymology 1

From Middle English cullen, cuilen, coilen, from Old French cuillir (“collect, gather, select”), from Latin colligō (“gather together”). Doublet of coil.

Verb

cull (third-person singular simple present culls, present participle culling, simple past and past participle culled)

  1. To pick or take someone or something (from a larger group).
    Synonym: cherry-pick
    • 1653, Georges de Scudéry, translated by Gent, F. G., Artamenes, or the Grand Cyrus‎[1], London, page 150:
      where Cyrus lay in ambuſh with ſix hundred men, which he had culled out for that purpoſe
    • 1984, cover star: JOE DALLESANDRO culled from Andy Warhol's FLESH — anonymous; sleeve notes from The Smiths' eponymous album
    • 2020 March 20, Doug Freeman, “Stuff That Works”, in The Austin Chronicle‎[2], volume 39, number 29, page 56:
      Likewise, performances culled mostly from the night's winning acts - with no special guests or even much in the way of mashups, a longtime AMA specialty - provided a much-needed shot in the arm for a reeling local populace.
  2. To gather, collect.
    • 1832 December (indicated as 1833), Alfred Tennyson, “Eleanore”, in Poems, London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page 26:
      [T]he yellowbanded bees, / Through half-open lattices / Coming in the scented breeze, / Fed thee, a child, lying alone, / With whitest honey in fairy gardens culled— […]
    • 1951, Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Nevill Coghill, The Canterbury Tales: Translated into Modern English (Penguin Classics), Penguin Books, published 1977, page 202:
      Chaucer's prose Tale of Melibee […] is a dialectal homily of moral debate, exhibiting a learned store of ethical precept culled from many ancient authorities.
    • 2018, Courtney Maum, Touch, page 109:
      There had been an effort a few years back by an artist no one had then heard of—a British New Yorker named Craig Ward, who had been inspired by a friend's photograph of the bacteria in her son's handprint to take to the New York subways to cull bacteria for himself. He'd brought back the microorganism samples in petri dishes that he filled with a jellylike substance that would continue to feed the bacteria, and let the human stories ripen in the heat throughout the summer.
  3. To select (animals, plants, humans, etc) from a group and then kill (them) in a controlled manner, typically to reduce the numbers of the group or remove group members who have an undesirable characteristic.
    • 1970, USDA Forest Service Research Paper PSW, issues 66-77, page 3:
      […] and tropical ash (81 percent of trees culled). Excessive lean, the second major culling factor, accounted for […] 13 percent of the tropical ash cull trees, and […]
  4. (Should we delete(+) this redundant sense?) (by extension) To kill (an animal, person, etc), for any reason.
    • 2002, Stephen Barber, Annihilation Zones: Far East Atrocities of the 20th Century, page 106:
      Berzin was then replaced by Stiepan Garanin, who was culled for being a 'Japanese spy' (although the uneducated Garanin pleaded to his torturers that he had never even heard of Japan); Garanin was then replaced by Andrei Vyshnyevtsky, who was culled for being insufficiently murderous; Vyshnyevtsky was then replaced by Ivan Nikishov, who was culled for no reason at all, just after Stalin had slyly decorated him with the 'Order of the Hero of the Soviet Union'; […]
  5. To lay off in order to reduce the numbers of; get rid of.
    The company culled more employees this month.
    • 2005 December 14, Jonah Bloom, “Time's staff cull won't be the last”, in The Guardian‎[3]:
      Time Inc, the world's largest publisher, has culled over 100 employees, including a handful of its most senior business executives.
    • 2020 December 12, Nick Slater, “How SEO Is Gentrifying the Internet”, in Current Affairs‎[4]:
      Once-popular sites like Livestrong, whose articles were mainly written by generalist staff writers and freelancers, had to dramatically cull their lineups.
  6. (computer graphics) To selectively not render or process certain objects, such as polygons.
    back-face culling
    • 2023 July 17, Blender Foundation, "Blender 3.6 Manual"‎[5], archived from the original on 4 October 2026:
      "Will cull any objects further from the camera than a given distance. When used in combination with camera frustum culling, this can be used to avoid culling nearby objects that are outside the camera frustum, but still visible in reflections. It is also useful to cull small objects far from the camera."
Derived terms
Translations

Noun

cull (plural culls)

  1. A selection.
  2. An organized killing of selected animals.
    • 2012 December 21, Isobel Montgomery, “A year that showed the best and worst of Britain”, in The Guardian Weekly‎[6], volume 188, number 2, page 31:
      It seemed that the sun shone and all was right in our Blakean islands until the government began to set in motion its promised cull of badgers in an effort to control bovine TB. Salvation for brock came in the form of an online petition started by Queen guitarist Brian May, the rising costs of the programme and the weather.
  3. (agriculture) An individual animal selected to be killed, or item of produce to be discarded.
  4. (seafood industry) A lobster having only one claw.
  5. A piece unfit for inclusion within a larger group; an inferior specimen.
  6. The act of laying off employees.
    • 2003 January 25, Mary O'Hara, “Store wars: who will be the casualties?”, in The Guardian‎[7]:
      If Sainsbury's or Tesco were to win there are fears of store closures, a cull of head office staff, and the possible loss of distribution jobs.
Translations

Etymology 2

Perhaps an abbreviation of cully.

Noun

cull (plural culls)

  1. (slang, dialectal) A fool, gullible person; a dupe.
    • 1749, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Folio Society, published 1973, page 307:
      Follow but my counsel, and I will show you a way to empty the pocket of a queer cull without any danger of the nubbing cheat.
  2. (UK, slang, obsolete) A man or boy.
    • 1997, Chris Hunt, Duval's Gold, page 58:
      But you don't want no dealings with that cull. A darker villain I never did see.
Synonyms
Derived terms
References
  • John Camden Hotten (1873), The Slang Dictionary

Albanian

Alternative forms

Etymology

Possibly from Proto-Indo-European *g(')elt- (“womb”). Compare Sanskrit जर्त (jarta), जर्तु (jártu, “vulva”), Swedish kull (“brood, litter”), Old English child. Çabej links the original meaning to skin, still present is some dialects as cull e mull (literally skin and belly, metaphorically big and small, all of them).[1]

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): [t͡suɫ]

Noun

cull m (plural cullë, definite culli, definite plural cullët)

  1. (Gheg) boy, child

Declension

Declension of cull
singular plural
indefinite definite indefinite definite
nominative cull culli cullë cullët
accusative cullin
dative culli cullit cullëve cullëve
ablative cullësh

Derived terms

References

  1. ^ Çabej, E. (1987), “cull”, in Studime etimologjike në fushë të shqipes (in Albanian), volumes III: C–D, Tirana: Akademia e Shkencave e Republikës Popullore të Shqipërisë, Instituti i Gjuhësisë dhe i Letërsisë, pages 63-65

Further reading

  • FGJSSH: Fjalor i gjuhës së sotme shqipe [Dictionary of the modern Albanian language]‎[8], 1980
  • Jani Thomai et al. (2006), “cull”, in FGJSH: Fjalor i gjuhës shqipe [Dictionary of the Albanian language] (in Albanian), Tiranë: Akademia e Shkencave e Shqipërisë

Catalan

Pronunciation

Verb

cull

  1. inflection of collir:
    1. third-person singular present indicative
    2. second-person singular imperative
This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.