Definitions

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

  • transitive verb To retire (someone) on a pension because of age or infirmity.
  • transitive verb To set aside or discard as old-fashioned or obsolete.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Superannuated; impaired or disabled through old age; lasting until useless.
  • To impair or disqualify in any way by old age: used chiefly in the past participle: as, a superannuated magistrate.
  • To set aside or displace as too old; specifically, to allow to retire from service on a pension, on account of old age or infirmity; give a retiring pension to; put on the retired list; pension off: as, to superannuate a seaman.
  • To last beyond the year.
  • To become impaired or disabled by length of years; live until weakened or useless.

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

  • intransitive verb obsolete To last beyond the year; -- said of annual plants.
  • transitive verb To impair or disquality on account of age or infirmity.
  • transitive verb To give a pension to, on account of old age or other infirmity; to cause to retire from service on a pension.

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

  • verb transitive to retire or put out of use due to age
  • verb transitive to show to be obsolete due to age
  • verb intransitive to retire due to age
  • verb intransitive to become obsolete or antiquated

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

  • verb declare to be obsolete
  • verb become obsolete
  • verb retire and pension (someone) because of age or physical inability
  • verb retire or become ineligible because of old age or infirmity

Etymologies

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

[Back-formation from superannuated.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from superannuated; Latin super "over" + annus "year"

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Examples

Comments

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  • "In the end, as with the Obama economic team, so the foreign policy team may be pushed in new directions sooner than anyone imagines and, willy-nilly, into some genuinely new thinking about a collapsing world. But not now. Not yet. Like our present financial bailouts, like that extra $30 billion that went into A.I.G. recently, the new Obama plan is superannuated on arrival. It represents graveyard thinking."

    - Tom Engelhardt, The Great Afghan Bailout, tomdispatch.com, 29 March 2009.

    March 30, 2009