DECIMATE Definition Meaning - Merriam-Webster Was the “to kill every tenth man” meaning the original use of decimate in English? Yes, but not by much It took only a few decades for decimate to acquire its broader, familiar meaning of “to severely damage or destroy,” which has been employed steadily since the 17th century
decimate - Wiktionary, the free dictionary Said to have been martyred as a Christian legionary commander of late Roman times for having refused an imperial order to kill one in ten (that is, decimate in the Roman meaning of the word) of the soldiers of another legion which had gone into revolt
Decimation (punishment) - Wikipedia In modern English, the word is used most commonly to mean total destruction or annihilation Decimation was the most extreme punishment of the Roman army, where a tenth of a unit that had proven its cravenness was killed
Decimate means much more today than it did in ancient Rome Michiel de Vaan, an etymologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, says decimate traces back to the Latin decimatio, by way of decimus, meaning a tenth In its original Latin form, decimatio "meant to take out and kill one-tenth of a group of soldiers," he says
DECIMATE definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary To decimate something such as a group of people or animals means to destroy a very large number of them The pollution could decimate the river's thriving population of kingfishers
Are You Using the Word ‘Decimate’ Correctly? - Word Smarts The English word “decimate” incorporates the Latin prefix deci-, meaning “one-tenth,” but more specifically, the term comes from the Latin decimatus, a past participle defined as “the removal or destruction of one-tenth ”
Decimate - Definition, Meaning Synonyms | Vocabulary. com If something is drastically reduced or killed, especially in number, you can say it was decimated "The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico decimated the wildlife along the coast " The verb decimate originally referred to a form of capital punishment for Roman troops
Decimate - definition of decimate by The Free Dictionary dec′i·ma′tion n Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a population