0 past simple and past participle of depopulate
1 to cause a country or area to have fewer people living in it:
For example, politicians from economically less privileged but politically over-represented districts may claim that poor, depopulated, and rural areas deserve to have more political weight.
As people left rural areas, their depopulated settlements were reclassified: townships officially became villages, and urban residents became rural people.
It presented an almost depopulated landscape, in which human function or sense of dislocation seemed irrelevant.
Areas depopulated by deaths and migration at the times of the famines did not recover earlier population densities until the mid-20th century.
The infectious period ended on the day the herd was depopulated.
The new industries required labour, and this was found by migration from the fanning regions which became relatively depopulated.
Most tellingly, the historic townscape is almost entirely depopulated of historical actors : we are given no sense of the individuals who helped to shape the town.
Prior to the 1994 reforms, it was common for some fast-growing urban districts to have three, four, or even five times the number of voters as depopulated rural districts.
