decimate

/dessimayt/

  • verb 1 kill or destroy a large proportion of. 2 drastically reduce the strength of.

  — DERIVATIVES decimation noun.

  — USAGE The earliest sense of decimate was ‘kill one in every ten of’, a reference to the ancient Roman practice of killing one in every ten of a group of soldiers as a collective punishment. This has been more or less totally superseded by the sense ‘kill or destroy a large proportion of’, although some traditionalists argue that this later sense is incorrect.

  — ORIGIN Latin decimare ‘take as a tenth’.

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