Third-person singular present tense: to turn off, disable, or stop the operation of something.
From the prefix 'de-' (meaning to reverse or remove) combined with 'activate' (to turn on). This compound emerged in the 20th century with modern technology.
This word perfectly shows how English adapts to new technology—we invented 'deactivate' when we needed to describe turning off complicated systems, and it's now used for everything from alarm codes to social media accounts.
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