deplumation

See deplume.

• IPA^(key): /ˌdiːpluːˈmeɪʃən/

deplumation (uncountable)

1. The stripping or falling off of plumes or feathers.
   • 1662, Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae:

     […] through the violence of her moulting, or deplumation, she comes into this earthly body deprived of that blessed life which she before enjoyed.

2. (medicine) Loss of the eyelashes due to disease of the eyelids.
   • 1979, Historia Ophthalmologica Internationalis - Volume 1, page 94:

     Systemic symptoms include headache, anorexia and sometimes nausea, vomiting, tinnitus and deafness, and deplumation or bleaching of the hair may occur.

   • 2006, The English in West Africa, 1691-1699: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 1681-1699, page 340:

     I hope now the violence both of his tartian [=tertian] ague & feaver & the deplun [=deplumation], which has been so troublesome in his eyes as since his last writing to your worships to quite deprive him of his sight, is gone of

   • 2019, Michael Winn, The Book of Joe B: A Love Story:

     Little did anyone expect that five decades after the company's launch, their research into deplumation would pan-out in a most unusual way — designer eyelashes.

3. (figurative) The stripping of someone's symbol(s) of status and prestige; humiliation.
   • 1851, Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches, page 318:

     If any person wishes to see one of the most neat, elegant, and at the same time thorough cases of deplumation, any where to be found in literary history, in which an individual who strutted on to the stage as a peacock, was soon obliged to leave it as a dove, he has only to read Dr. Beck's articles in "The Literary World," in which the fabricated quotation of Mr. Webster, and Professor Felton's defence of it, are shown to be exceedingly bad as Latin, and much worse as logic.

   • 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature:

     If the humiliation and baseness of such an acquiescence would not have revolted the self-love and pride of a man like Sir Philip Francis, at any rate he was not a fool, and the mere risk of detection and deplumation, which might have happened any day, would have prevented him from enduring his false feathers.

   • 1866, S.B. Ellis, Memoris and Services of the Late Lieutenant-general, page 259:

     Occasionally a Chinese or two would be detected bringing this liquor to the joss-house for sale, and whenever the guilt of a culprit was established, the invariable punishment was a smart bambooing and loss of tail; nothing earthly is so humiliating to a Chinaman as the deplumation of his queue, an ornament to him of great personal pride and care , and the longer and thicker the queue is, so much the more is he admired and envied.

   • 2002, Bruce Hampton, Children of Grace: The Nez Perce War of 1877, page 181:

     From his headquarters in Minnesota and anxious to regain lost ground after his deplumation the summer before, General Terry proclaimed Gibbon's effort a "brilliant success."