Dictionaries › English

devastate

Pronunciation: /ˈdɛv.ə.steɪt/

The English word “devastate” has 4 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. To ruin many or all things over a large area, such as most or all buildings of a city, or cities of a region, or trees of a forest.
  2. To destroy a whole collection of related ideas, beliefs, and strongly held opinions.
  3. To break beyond recovery or repair so that the only options are abandonment or the clearing away of useless remains (if any) and starting over.
  4. To greatly demoralize, to cause to suffer intense grief or dismay

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin dēvastātus, perfect passive participle of dēvastō (“to lay waste, devastate”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)); from dē- (augmentative prefix) + vastō (“to destroy, lay waste”). See vast. First attested in 1638.

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “devastate” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.