liquidation

What it means

1. The act or process of liquidating or of being liquidated.
   1. countableuncountablebusinessThe act or process of winding up the affairs of a company; the selling of the assets of a business as part of the process of dissolving the business.

      The store is having a liquidation sale: everything must go as they go out of business.

      1 more example

      And, in a sign of how wide the property crash is, the latest item to turn up in liquidation sales in Dublin is a job lot of 15 cranes, including a pair towering over Anglo Irish Bank's half-built headquarters in the city's docklands.

      2011 February 21, Lisa O’Carroll, “Hundreds of repossessed homes in Ireland to be sold by auction”, in Alan Rusbridger, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC

   2. countableuncountablebusinessThe clearing off or settling of a debt.

      Their compenſation becomes part of the national debt, for the liquidation of which there is the one exhautſtleſs fund.

      1790 November, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. […], London: […] J[ames] Dodsley, […], →OCLC, page 182

      2 more examples

      [A] money-box was kept on the kitchen mantelshelf, into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.

      1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter VII, in Great Expectations […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 90

      Gilles Postel-Vinay has calculated that the increased peasant debt of the 1930s was lighter than that of the previous agricultural depression of the 1880s because the wartime profits and inflation of 1914–18 had permitted the liquidation of previous debt.

      1997, Robert O[wen] Paxton, “The Depression”, in French Peasant Fascism: Henry Dorgères’s Greenshirts and the Crises of French Agriculture, 1929–1939, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, chapter 1 (The Triple Crisis of the French Peasantry, 1929–39), page 14

   3. countableeuphemisticuncountableThe act or process of abolishing or eliminating; the murder of dehumanized victims.

      Near-synonyms: devitalization, fatality; see also Thesaurus:death, Thesaurus:killing

      3 more examples

      When Stalinists spoke of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, they intentionally created ambiguity regarding reeducation versus murder.

      History is liquidating liberalism and preparing for the liquidation of pseudo-labor pacifism for the very purpose of recreating Chartism on new, incomparably higher historical foundations.

      1925, Leon Trotsky, anonymous translator, “Two Traditions: The Great Rebellion and Chartism”, in Whither England?, New York, N.Y.: International Publishers, →OCLC, page 145

      [T]he Russians themselves, as her picture shows, took starvation almost as a matter of course, just as they, and she, take as a matter of course the liquidation of unfortunate individuals with contra-revolutionary idealogies.

      1932 January 2, The Week-end Review, volume V, London: The Week-end Review, Ltd., →OCLC, page 24, column 1

      Synonyms: devitalization, fatality, death, end, tomb, celestial transfer, decease, decomposition

In a sentence

The store is having a liquidation sale: everything must go as they go out of business.

Where it comes from

1. Proto-Indo-European*wleykʷ-
2. Proto-Indo-European*wlikʷéh₁yeti
3. Proto-Italic*(w)likʷēō
4. Latinliqueō
5. Proto-Indo-European*dʰeh₁-
6. Classical Latinliquidus
7. Late Latinliquidō
8. Late Latinliquidātu
9. Englishliquidate
10. Late Latinliquidō
11. Italianliquidare
12. Middle Frenchliquider
13. Middle Frenchliquidation
14. Englishliquidation

* From liquidate + -ion (suffix forming nouns denoting an action or process). Liquidate is a learned borrowing from Late Latin liquidātus, the perfect passive participle of liquidō (“to turn into a liquid, melt; to make clear”), from Classical Latin liquidus (“fluid, liquid; clear, transparent”) + -ō. * Alternatively, a borrowing from Middle French liquidation, from liquider (“to liquidate”) + -ation (suffix forming nouns denoting an action or process). Liquider is probably a borrowing from Italian liquidare, itself also from the aforementioned Late Latin liquidō by borrowing. Sense 1.2 (“the act of killing or abolishing”) is a semantic loan from Russian ликвида́ция (likvidácija).