gnaw out

The protest was almost gnawed out of existence by officials even before it happened.

They went in the easy way and came gnawing out through his back and chest and belly.

A beetle volunteers to climb up the shotgun barrels to gnaw out the gunshot.

Under them miners, protected from rocks or Greek fire from above, could gnaw out a tunnel beneath the foundations of the main tower.

When there was (before rust claimed the wire and ants gnawed out the fence posts), it was high only in a relative sense.

Garric felt the same revulsion he'd known the night he found a rat lapping the blood of the pigeon whose throat it had gnawed out.

I wandered, Virgil-less, following the terrible path gnawed out of decayed human flesh, wondering why I was being shown all this, what it meant.

Would I have gnawed out my heart, hollowed my breast, stained my cheeks with rivers of...Oh!

It aims, I think, to be a wild side but at home and under wraps; like the fox gnawing out the vitals of the boy who hid it inside his shirt and smiled.

It was already the center of a mass of small black bodies which pulled and hacked at the tough armor, gnawing out great lumps of flesh to be carried to the nearest ant-city.

Endlessly resourceful in depravity, obscenity, and every iniquity, the Coranyid abide their darksome halls, gnawing out their poisonous souls, until through escape or release they are loosed upon the world.

An English Roman Catholic wrote the following in 1602 his preface to the Jesuit Catechism: "To receive Jesuits into a Kingdom is to receive a vermin which at length will gnaw out the heart of the State both spiritual and temporal.

There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.

"She loves hot dogs -- although living in California she's become enamored of organic chicken hot dogs -- plays with the kids in the backyards, sleeps on the beds with the family members, and raids the closet whenever the door is left open to gnaw out the lining of Gabriel's shoes," Anderson added.