Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To move, dig out, or demolish with a bulldozer.
  • intransitive verb To coerce, intimidate, or bully.
  • intransitive verb To do away with; terminate.
  • intransitive verb To operate a bulldozer.
  • intransitive verb To proceed forcefully or insensitively.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To punish summarily with a bull-whip; cowhide.
  • To coerce or intimidate by violence or threats; especially, in politics, to bully; influence unfairly: applied particularly to the practices of some southern whites since the civil war.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb Slang, U.S. To intimidate; to restrain or coerce by intimidation or violence; -- used originally of the intimidation of negro voters, in Louisiana.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb To destroy with a bulldozer.
  • verb UK to push someone over by heading straight over them. Often used in conjunction with "over".
  • verb UK To push through forcefully.
  • verb UK to shoot down an idea immediately and forcefully.
  • verb US, slang, dated To intimidate; to restrain or coerce by intimidation or violence; used originally of the intimidation of black voters in Louisiana.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb flatten with or as if with a bulldozer

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps from alteration of obsolete bulldose, severe beating : bull + dose.]

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Examples

  • And then there is this so called "infill," aka bulldoze old city, built NYC here and now, but all 100 year old new modern (no "phony" craftsman for them).

    Crosscut 2009

  • And then there is this so called "infill," aka bulldoze old city, built NYC here and now, but all 100 year old new modern (no "phony" craftsman for them).

    Crosscut 2009

  • This is really no different than how foreign assistance and FDI are deployed by a plethora of other countries - such as Japan - but China's tendency is to 'bulldoze' its way into developing countries, providing cash and assistance in order to secure natural resources.

    Stephen Goldsmith: Geopolitics with Chinese Characteristics Goldsmith 2010

  • This is the candidate who suggested it was okay to "bulldoze" the St. Petersburg Pier.

    Excuse me, Mr. Wagman, but how exactly do you plan on paying for 100 more cops? Peter Schorsch 2009

  • The turtles may "bulldoze", pushing their heads through the soil, and then raise their earth-covered heads to peer about.

    Turtle 2008

  • He says he wants to force the administration to "bulldoze" the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year.

    Rachel Sklar: Brit Hume, John Murtha, And The Washington Post: The Broken Telephone Of A Smear 2008

  • His decision not to hold a poll is a "nakedly cynical" calculation that he can "bulldoze" the treaty into law.

    Archive 2007-09-01 Richard 2007

  • His decision not to hold a poll is a "nakedly cynical" calculation that he can "bulldoze" the treaty into law.

    Us and them Richard 2007

  • He says he wants to force the administration to "bulldoze" the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year.

    From On High 2007

  • And there's this new idea that we've heard about that you're going to kind of bulldoze and blow up everything around the government center and kind of make a park or a green zone.

    CNN Transcript Jul 5, 2006 2006

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