expunge

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The Word of the Day for April 28 is:

expunge   \ik-SPUNJ\   verb
    *1 : to strike out, obliterate, or mark for deletion
     2 : to efface completely : destroy
     3 : to eliminate (as a memory) from one's consciousness

Example sentence:
     The defendant's lawyer is seeking to have the conviction 
expunged from his client's criminal record.

Did you know? 
     In medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, a series of dots 
was used to mark mistakes or to label material that should be 
deleted from a text, and those deletion dots can help you 
remember the history of "expunge." They were known as "puncta 
delentia." The "puncta" part of the name derives from the Latin 
verb "pungere," which can be translated as "to prick or sting" 
(and you can imagine that a scribe may have felt stung when his 
mistakes were so punctuated in a manuscript). "Pungere" is also 
an ancestor of "expunge," as well as a parent of other dotted, 
pointed, or stinging terms such as "punctuate," 
"compunction," "poignant," "puncture," and "pungent."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.