(v. t.) To strip, as of clothing; to divest or unclothe.
(v. t.) To deprive for spoil; to plunder; to rob; to pillage; to strip; to divest; -- usually followed by of.
(n.) Spoil.
Example Sentences:
(1) Despoiled of its land through a series of racial colonial measures, Zimbabwe at independence inherited a gross skew in land ownership.
(2) We have run up debts, despoiled the planet and allowed too many of our institutions to wither.
(3) Sir David Attenborough, who recently discussed climate change in a meeting with US president Barack Obama, said: “I have been involved in arguments about the despoilation of the natural world for many years.
(4) Victors like to forget how they got their spoils, but the despoiled have long memories.
(5) Despoiling of the dead is illegal under the Geneva conventions as well as under US military law.
(6) Thousands of tonnes despoiled the beaches of Cornwall – and thousands more were propelled by winds and currents across the channel towards France.
(7) And, in his case, quite a few headlines created to fit the paper's narrative of minorities in general and Muslims in particular as bad lots, despoilers of society.
(8) From early, delicate watercolours to his cycles of despoiled paintings, this retrospective gives full measure to Kiefer’s preoccupations with German history, the holocaust, mythology and the wretchedness of our age.
(9) Fracking has been linked to air and water pollution, radioactive waste, despoiled land and methane emissions, although this has been disputed by some scientists and the fracking industry.
(10) Deficits in abstractive ability, when they exist, are believed to be due to a schizophrenic patient's inability to prevent task-irrelevant information that originates in long-term memory from spilling into and despoiling the operations of working memory.
(11) For too long the governments of the region, often with international encouragement, have looked upon the sea as a bottomless resource pit to be despoiled at will.
(12) The Guardian feared the icon would be despoiled – as if the World Service audience would be treated to a steady diet of stories about car crashes on the M25 instead of analyses of Indian politics.
(13) How you can take on their surface effects – the black turtleneck, listening to Bob Dylan, friends with Bono – yet still pay your Chinese workers a pitiful amount, despoil the environment, do shady stock transactions, pay no tax.” Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine first look review – Apple founder's sour side Read more Gibney says Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell initially offered to help with the project but then backed off.
(14) So extensive is the rout of pre-modern spiritual and metaphysical traditions that it is hard to even imagine their resurrection, let alone the restoration, on a necessarily large scale, of a non-instrumental view of human life (and the much-despoiled natural world).
(15) Poundbury is a de luxe version of the gross and insensitive "executive" homes that so despoil Britain.
(16) And it's all done without despoiling so much as a blade of grass.
(17) It was the worst spill in Nigeria in 13 years in a part of that country where the oil and gas industry has been despoiling the environment for more than 50 years, on a scale that dwarfs the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico by a wide margin.
Pillage
Definition:
(n.) The act of pillaging; robbery.
(n.) That which is taken from another or others by open force, particularly and chiefly from enemies in war; plunder; spoil; booty.
(v. i.) To strip of money or goods by open violence; to plunder; to spoil; to lay waste; as, to pillage the camp of an enemy.
(v. i.) To take spoil; to plunder; to ravage.
Example Sentences:
(1) Crowds attacked a police station in Kef yesterday, pillaging documents and equipment and setting it on fire.
(2) Sitting with him as he spoke were Sigourney Weaver and Joel David Moore, who starred in Avatar , which charts the fight of the fictitious Na'vi people against outside attempts to pillage their resources on the planet Pandora.
(3) The area was pillaged, women were raped, murders committed.
(4) Makhaya wrote: “These contradictions, Rhodes the pillager and Rhodes the benefactor, are a symbol of our country’s evolution towards a yet to be attained just and inclusive order.
(5) At a press conference on Thursday, the Ivorian state prosecutor Simplice Kouadia Koffi said the couple were accused of "aggravated theft, attacks on the national economy, embezzlement of public funds and pillage".
(6) They were pillaging our shit,” Gates says, speaking of the modernists, who were influenced by deliberately abstracted proportions and forms in African figural carvings, often meant to represent more than one person.
(7) There is a rape culture – a mindset that seems to have infected every aspect of our lives: the raping of the Earth through ecological destruction by the corporate powerful, pillaging resources for their own coffers with no concern for the Earth, or the indigenous peoples, or the notion of reciprocity; the rape of the poor through exploitation, land grabs, neglect; the rape of women's bodies through physical violence and commodification, where a girl can be purchased for less than the cost of a mobile phone.
(8) Based on Robert Edsel's book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes , the film focuses on the ragtag group of Americans, played by Clooney, Damon, Murray, Goodman and Bob Balaban, one Brit (Hugh Bonneville – Heslov is a big fan of Downton Abbey) and one Frenchman (Jean Dujardin, who is sweet in the film, even if he clearly only understood about one English word in every five of his lines) who were formed to try to save some of the great works of European art and architecture from being destroyed and pillaged during the second world war.
(9) In a striking breach of precedence, the Taliban militia did not make use of their unspoken right to pillage and loot.
(10) Will Cragin, the IMC's programme co-ordinator for North Kivu province, said there was no fighting and no deaths, but "lots of pillaging and systematic raping of women".
(11) Government forces have committed gross violations of human rights and the war crimes of torture, hostage-taking, murder, execution without due process, rape, attacking protected objects and pillage.
(12) "We have criminals, and semi-criminals, carrying out killings, robbery, and pillaging," he says.
(13) Others see the removal of boatloads of ancient art by Elgin's agents as an act of pillage.
(14) Photograph: Shawn Carrié Despite his unapologetic endorsement of pillaging, after listening to him talk for hours, I couldn’t shake the impression that looters like Dante couldn’t just be condemned as opportunistic thieves.
(15) Former Congolese vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba denies charges that he unleashed his personal militia to murder, rape and pillage in the Central African Republic in 2002-03.
(16) Nigeria’s army has faced repeated allegations of rights abuses, including summary executions, rape and pillage – charges which authorities deny.
(17) The international criminal court has convicted a rebel leader of charges including murder and pillage over a deadly attack on a village in eastern Congo, but acquitted him of rape, sexual slavery and using child soldiers.
(18) Hopes of a deal have been severely tested in recent days by the increasingly bitter war of words, with the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras , accusing the country’s creditors of “pillaging” Greece, while European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, previously seen as sympathetic to Greece’s cause, said the government was misleading the Greek public about the negotiations.
(19) The UN mission has a difficult mandate to support the Congolese army, whose troops often are also accused of raping and pillaging.
(20) It’s also built around the pillaged scores of 15th-century sacred choral music – hence the Guide inviting him back to church for the first time since he was 14.