From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpopulatepop‧u‧late /ˈpɒpjəleɪt $ ˈpɑː-/ verb [transitive] 1 LIVE SOMEWHEREif an area is populated by a particular group of people, they live there The highlands are populated mainly by peasant farmers.densely/heavily/highly/thickly populated (=with a lot of people) one of the most densely populated areas in the worldsparsely/thinly/lightly populated (=with very few people)Grammar Populate is usually passive.2 technical to fill a computer database or table with information → See Verb table
Examples from the Corpus
populate• Nicholson's are emphatically not backstreet boozers populated by men in cloth caps talking about their ferrets.• It is often said that the North East was populated by successive generations of industrial scabs.• The Haight was largely populated by trekkers from Alabama and Louisiana.• Other industrialized and densely populated countries have similar problems.• Exponentially reproducing pornographic images are populating cyberspace.• The spiders have instinctively achieved their objective of populating new areas.• The start string is automatically populated with any alphanumeric characters preceding the wild characters.sparsely/thinly/lightly populated• The Earth is sparsely populated and desolate, with many tower blocks lying decayed and uninhabited.• The county is 100 miles long and my constituency is the most sparsely populated area of Cornwall.• Both are thinly populated areas far from departure and arrival points presently used by local commuters.• An important minority of the population lives in far flung, sparsely populated areas such as the highlands and islands.• The work of the Community Education Project indicates how a new pattern of education could emerge in sparsely populated areas.• These expeditions were usually carried out in remote, sparsely populated areas.• The neon chicken radiates orange warmth into the sparsely populated diner.• Formerly the Amazon region was more thinly populated than the Sahara, containing perhaps some 50000 people, and importing food. 