(n.) Wide and general destruction; devastation; waste.
(v. t.) To devastate; to destroy; to lay waste.
(n.) A cry in war as the signal for indiscriminate slaughter.
Example Sentences:
(1) Pakistan has been elected as the scapegoat because the Lashkar-e-Taiba, widely believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks, are based there and have been the chosen agents of the country's intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence, for creating havoc in Kashmir in the past.
(2) Even digital news, which has wreaked havoc on all other news, finds the advertising revenues that support it dwindling (or failing to grow).
(3) Last month, for example, the Daily Telegraph's Peter Oborne bemoaned their "devastating" fate, in a piece worth quoting at reasonable length, if only to prove that the idea of an out-of-touch elite blithely wreaking havoc is not the preserve of hard-bitten lefties.
(4) Though the al-Shabaab camps are not on the scale of those seen a decade ago, the National Security Council has been warned that it only takes one extremist to return home unnoticed to create potential havoc.
(5) It was a fairly valiant attempt from Manchester United , but as their players grew leggy from chasing shadows, they dropped deep and let Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery wreak their unique brand of havoc.
(6) Rajoy’s hope is that Sánchez’s failure in the upcoming investiture vote wreaks havoc inside the PSOE, potentially opening the door to a scenario that might favour him.
(7) Six years later, as the cultural revolution wreaked havoc, young Xi was dispatched to the dusty, impoverished north-western province of Shaanxi to "learn from the masses".
(8) Chief executive John Walden said retailers have learned their lesson from last year’s Black Friday sales bonanza, which wreaked havoc on the high street and hit shops’ profits in the run-up to Christmas.
(9) Walk more Saño, who shot to fame in 2013 for breaking down in tears and fasting for two weeks at UN climate talks after typhoon Haiyan wreaked havoc in his country, is currently walking 1,500km from Rome to this year’s conference in Paris.
(10) But at least they won it, Kim Jung-woo causing mild havoc in the area with a free kick in from the right, Lugano forced to head behind.
(11) The "blue" in "Blue Labour" comes from a conservative conviction that market forces, unconstrained, play havoc with the fabric of people's lives.
(12) These and other voters could also be attracted to the AfD by media reports that a strong showing for the party could wreak havoc with parliamentary arithmetic.
(13) But the US, Israel and other western spy agencies have also spent years slipping faulty parts into black market consignments of equipment heading to Iran – each designed to wreak havoc inside the delicate machinery requirement for enrichment.
(14) Patchy showers will continue throughout the weekend in some areas, she added, though in general conditions would be much drier than last weekend, when heavy rain and winds wrought havoc across south-west England and Wales.
(15) On the Apollo missions, lunar dust got everywhere – the crews inhaled it and got it in their eyes, and it wreaked mechanical havoc – and on Mars the dust is even more problematic, because it is highly oxidised, chemically reactive, electrically charged and windblown.
(16) "The effect on Kenya's export industries is catastrophic as much of the country's exports are based on fresh produce, and a lack of reliable power creates havoc with irrigation and temperature controls in greenhouses," says Steve Mutiso, Oxfam's disaster risk reduction officer.
(17) Exactly one year ago, fierce winter weather was causing havoc across the UK .
(18) It's also the product of the wider crisis of neoliberal capitalism that first erupted in the banking system five years ago and has since wreaked havoc on public finances, jobs, services and living standards throughout the western world.
(19) They were widely derided for being the "Postman Pats" of international terrorism, but the Welsh nationalists' prolific firebombing campaign of holiday cottages begun at the end of the 1970s caused havoc in the rural idyll of the Lleyn peninsula.
(20) The storm caused havoc on six of the country's 7,107 islands, so most resorts and tourists activities are open and fully functional, and those that were hit are quickly getting back on their feet in the run up to December and January, two of their busiest months of the year.
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.