Definition of populate in English:

populate

verb

[with object]

1Form the population of (a place)
‘the island is populated by scarcely 40,000 people’
‘a cosy rural town populated with friendly folk’
- ‘The city is densely populated with the second highest number of people per hectare in the whole of the south-east.’
- ‘The crash site is densely populated with lots of small homes.’
- ‘Pretty soon the place was populated with everybody from gypsies to prime ministers to people with turbans running around - it was indeed an Orson party.’
- ‘This trend continued into the Industrial Revolution, when the city was populated with the upper classes in amongst the industrial sprawls of Manchester and Liverpool.’
- ‘The battlefield is populated with a large number of mooks (grunt soldiers), and several more powerful officers, on both sides.’
- ‘From D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation forward, cinema has reminded us that battlefields are populated with human beings, not toy soldiers.’
- ‘The vast 17-acre site is populated with members of the Sarawak's various ethnic groups and their longhouses.’
- ‘Their comments area is populated with people openly posting their first name and last names as attribution.’
- ‘The city is populated with blue-collar union workers who always vote for Democrats.’
- ‘Rural areas were less densely populated with basically the same family structure until social security and child labor laws came about.’
- ‘The island is populated with massive herds of brontosaurus, but the big old meat-eaters would rather chase down six humans instead of going for the easy kill.’
- ‘The modern battlefield is increasingly populated with civilians and paramilitary operatives who accompany U.S. forces in support of military operations.’
- ‘Many beggars and vagabonds had also gathered in this place, the limited flatlands around the area was populated with white tents and pieces of clothing hanging upon long lines to dry.’
- ‘And we used to have abandoned buildings; now the area is heavily populated with businesses and people, and new influxes of people are coming in because of the safety of the area.’
- ‘Updike's universe is populated with ‘the little ones,’ who, like so many of us, stumble through life in search of meaning.’
- ‘The Red Zone is still populated with those more likely to farm, ranch, hunt, fish, drive pick-ups, even attend church regularly.’
- ‘Most of China's western provinces are populated with Turkish-speaking Muslims, who are deeply affected by what happens beyond the frontier.’
- ‘You can almost smell the stench of the garbage; poor families struggle in dismal apartments; the streets are populated with the homeless and dispossessed.’
- ‘The field is populated with specialists examining different ways to enhance and better their own educational or technological niche.’
- ‘This city was populated with a good number of cats and dogs.’
- ‘The landscape is populated with many different beasts, although some parts of the world sometimes seem barren and empty.’
inhabit, live in, reside in, occupy, people
View synonyms
1. 1.1Cause people to settle in (a place).
  ‘The earthern barriers to the surrounding arms of the Fraser have existed in some form since the settlers first started populating the area in the mid to late 1800s.’
  ‘Much of the world was not populated, settlements of people existed here and there.’
  ‘In Monterey Bay, California, scientists documented a complete turnover of the marine population with cold water fish moving northward and warm water fish and sea animals moving in to populate that area.’
  ‘But mainly they work in the home and raise the enormous families that they hope will populate the Territories: new generations raised in the settler way of thinking.’
  ‘Macedonians move out of apartment blocks and neighbourhoods populated by Albanians.’
  ‘Before colonization, Cameroon was a territory of diverse climatic zones populated by a variety of peoples and polities.’
  ‘German foreigners, the few Jews, and Chilean peasants coexist in a space hemmed in by borders which my prose opens and closes to mark the diversity of voices that populate this region.’
  ‘Thousands of previous instances of cars moving on streets tell us that cars usually populate streets, so much so that a street devoid of cars is rather eerie.’
  ‘French Guiana is populated by settlers from both China and India, in addition to France.’
  ‘There would be no influx of settlers to populate the Holy Land with Latin Christians.’
  ‘Oklahoma is largely populated by pioneers from other States.’
  ‘Leppings Lane end, with room to move about, populated by pitmen - they weren't called miners in those days.’
  ‘Unilateral empire might work today if the world beyond America's borders were populated by five billion Buddhist monks, willing to calmly endure.’
  ‘Before the Herero people settled in this country, it was populated by the San and the Bergdama.’
  ‘Euramerican pioneers populated the central Mojave so recently that many survived into the mid-twentieth century as celebrated living relics.’
  ‘In contrast to the closed components, all the open ones were well populated at all concentrations.’
  ‘The islands were first settled in part by Portuguese prisoners sent to populate the remote archipelago as a condition of their release.’
  settle, settle in, colonize, people, move into, occupy, take up residence in, make one's home in, open up, pioneer, overrun
  View synonyms
2. 1.2Fill or be present in (a place or sphere)
  ‘the film is an epic fantasy populated by grotesque weirdos’
  ‘Certainly grotesque characters populate the world, as in all of the Coens' films, but a lot of the film ultimately centers on Ed's obsession with cleanliness.’
  ‘Given that Haslam has played and improvised enough characters to populate a small city, is there some quality that unites the less ephemeral ones?’
  ‘Here's a brief guide to the freaks and grotesques that populate the Peepshow world.’
  ‘Kari draws out a wonderful performance from old schoolmate Tomas Lemarquis, as Noi, a complex and compelling character, while populating his village with a host of interesting amateurs.’
  ‘Viewers can follow the action, get close to the wacky characters populating poker rooms, and pick up tips.’
  ‘He populates his worlds with characters that are not out of place in the fabricated environments.’
  ‘His characters populated the backgrounds of movie lots and locations, and they did their jobs.’
  ‘Blom, I assume, contrasts these quotidian images from the early part of the last century with what appears to be a semblance of normality for the characters who populate the background of these works.’
  ‘The cast of characters that populates the pages of the O'Connor diaries is vast.’
  ‘Its market positioning is more Mallory Towers than Jilly Cooper, as the strong female characters that populate its pages tend to have a good, wholesome, practical approach to sexual relationships.’
  ‘She reminded me of the characters that populate Hardy's novels, whose spheres of experience are entirely contained within the radius of work and home.’
  ‘At some point, increasing error causes major information loss because many conformations populate the average noise sphere.’
  ‘Often dispensing with the formulas which govern dramatic construction, his dramaturgy conjures a magical world populated by a vast array of picaresque characters.’
  ‘It was a crazy, hothouse atmosphere populated by exceptionally gifted, strong-willed characters who seemed to drift in and out whenever they pleased.’
  ‘While their plays are set in the same remote areas of Ireland and exhibit the same, almost cliched, ability to spin a good yarn, the characters with which the writers populate their worlds are starkly different.’
  ‘Cavorting among the alphabet characters are tiny human figures, veritable Tom Thumbs, populating a world of extravagantly scaled objects.’
  ‘The quality of Miéville's writing is often breathtaking, his skill at characterisation unsurpassed, but in many ways even more remarkable is his sheer inventiveness, the genius with which he creates and populates his fantastic world.’
  ‘Dealing with life outside and inside of prison, All Things Censored draws us into parallel universes populated by people struggling for humanity.’
  ‘Fritz The Cat's world is populated by all kinds of crazy and kooky characters.’
  ‘They populate fantasies, are given attributes important to the fan, and their reactions to any of this are rarely considered.’
3. 1.3Computing Fill in (data).
  ‘In such a case it makes more sense to use a conventional ETL (extract, transform and load) tool to populate the data warehouse rather than attempt to federate it with transactional sources.’
  ‘I quickly corrected the error and re-ran the Perl script that generates the HTML pages and populates the database for the search engine.’
  ‘In any event, when I tried to skirt the browser interface and populate the cluster database manually with the provided script, I was greeted with what I consider the death knell of this project.’
  ‘‘Software development is easy - you don't have data protection problems until you start populating a database,’ Bierce says.’
  ‘Having been worried that the entire gaming internet was populated by homophobic teens, that's a better ratio than I was expecting.’
  ‘You're not going to let them write to the file, just read, populate the spreadsheet.’
  ‘We use this technique to populate the database selector in the example.’
  ‘The next goal is to populate a database of 600,000 direct-mail addresses with e-mail addresses, the better to reach customers directly and cheaply.’
  ‘You're almost ready to start populating the LDAP database.’
  ‘The system arrived with 2GB of DDR2 memory, with 4GB possible when the motherboard is fully populated.’
  ‘However, there just aren't enough bytes to populate the game itself.’
  ‘Instead, they can simply populate the backplane with the desired drive type.’
  ‘The salesperson's identity, perhaps, could be used as the key to draw in any supplementary material and customer details could be populated from their name alone.’
  ‘Instead of buying a database of leads, or having telemarketers working to create lead databases, web forms allow site owners to have the prospects themselves populate a business database.’
  ‘The data should be populated into the quality performance database and used to balance against the quality measurement information.’
  ‘The DIMM slots are colour coded, but they are colour coded by channel, rather than by which slots should be populated in order to enable dual channel DDR.’
  ‘The bottom portion of the frame is populated by the complex geometry and sprites that make up the environment, while the top portion contains some geometry and the large sky box.’
  ‘Memory must be populated 10 DIMMs at a time, with two DIMMs per cartridge and a total of five cartridges.’
  ‘Having the LED between two PCI slots means you can easily mistake which slot has the problem if both are populated above and below the LED.’
  ‘Motherboards with an odd number of DIMM slots will still run in dual-channel mode even when a third or fifth slot is populated, the company added.’