depredation
Other forms: depredations
The horrors of war include depredation — the plundering and ransacking of the defeated and their homes, the terrible, unrestrained preying on the conquered. The word depredation entails all of the pain humans inflict upon each other.
The Latin language makes the noun praeda "prey" into the verb praedārī, which then means "to plunder." As if that wasn't enough — they added the prefix de-, "thoroughly," to create a word that says it all. In 15th-century French, the word became depredation, but the meaning was far from refined, describing a wholesale pillaging of those who became the "prey" and continuing the history of man’s inhumanity to man.
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an act of plundering and pillaging and marauding
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synonyms:
predation
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type of:
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pillage, pillaging, plundering
the act of stealing valuable things from a place
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pillage, pillaging, plundering
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(usually plural) a destructive action“the depredations of age and disease”
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synonyms:
ravage
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type of:
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demolition, destruction, wipeout
an event (or the result of an event) that completely destroys something
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demolition, destruction, wipeout
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Vocabulary lists containing depredation
This novel is a fictionalized biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, a mathematical genius who begins work as an indentured servant on a ship before becoming a captain and celebrated navigator.
This nonfiction book presents research about the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans in 1492, shedding new light on the knowledge that these groups had in the fields of science, engineering, medicine, agriculture, and more.
This pioneering work of photojournalism documents the gulf between life in the rich neighborhoods and poor slums of New York City in the 1880s.
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