The potential of activated carbon prepared from the seeds of Manilkara zapota, an agricultural waste, was assessed for dephenolation from aqueous solution. ZnCl(2) was used as the activating agent. Batch adsorption experiments were conducted to study the effect of various physicochemical parameters such as initial concentration, close of adsorbent, initial pH, and temperature. The precentage removal of phenol was found to increase with the decrease in initial concentration of phenol. Maximum removal efficiency of 96% was achieved with 25 mg/L of initial phenol concentration it pH 4.0 and temperature 30 degrees C. Equilibrium modelling by linearized adsorption isotherms revealed that Freundlich isotherm could Well represent the observed data for phenol adsorption oil activated carbon as compared to Langmuir isotherm. Thermodynamic studies revealed that the sorption of pheno by activated carbon is ail endothermic process, showing increase ill sorption at higher temperature. Comparison or various kinetic models based oil correlation coefficients revealed that the pseudo second order model, an indication of chemisorption mechanism, fits better the experimental data than the pseudo first order Lagergren model.