ALL meanings of decimation
dec·i·mate
D d - verb with object decimation to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague. 1
- verb with object decimation to select by lot and kill every tenth person of. 1
- verb with object decimation Obsolete. to take a tenth of or from. 1
- noun decimation killing 10 percent of a population 1
- noun decimation mass destruction or murder 1
- noun decimation The killing or destruction of a large portion of a population. 1
- noun decimation The earliest English sense of decimate is “to select by lot and execute every tenth soldier of (a unit).” The extended sense “destroy a great number or proportion of” developed in the 19th century: Cholera decimated the urban population. Because the etymological sense of one-tenth remains to some extent, decimate is not ordinarily used with exact fractions or percentages: Drought has destroyed (not decimated) nearly 80 percent of the cattle. 1
- noun decimation (strictly) The killing or punishment of every tenth person, usually by lot. 0
- noun decimation (generally) The killing or destruction of any large portion of a population. 0
- noun decimation A tithe or the act of tithing. 0
- noun decimation (mathematics) The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of a source sequence. 0
- noun decimation (telecommunications) A digital signal-processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal. 0