What's the difference between pillage and ransack?

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.

Ransack


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To search thoroughly; to search every place or part of; as, to ransack a house.
  • (v. t.) To plunder; to pillage completely.
  • (v. t.) To violate; to ravish; to defiour.
  • (v. i.) To make a thorough search.
  • (n.) The act of ransacking, or state of being ransacked; pillage.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Some have been threatened and assaulted, while others’ homes have been ransacked, their families living in constant fear.
  • (2) Gangs of armed men ransacked and burned homes of government supporters and residents from tribes sympathetic to the government.
  • (3) The attackers entered the buildings, ransacked each and set them on fire, but did not penetrate the safe rooms.
  • (4) They’ve just ransacked the house, it’s horrible, it’s terrible,” said Melissa Mill.
  • (5) While his political allegiances led to the ransacking of his office in 1965, following the coup d'etat the year before that brought the military to power under General Castelo Branco, Niemeyer remained a well known and popular figure among ordinary Brazilians, to whom he was always "Oscar", and evidently adored, although younger generations of Brazilian architects have inevitably felt hidden in his shadow.
  • (6) These were forerunners of today's "conscious hip-hop" (not for nothing is Gamble and Huff's catalogue among the most ransacked by rappers for samples).
  • (7) That all I could hear – BANG – and I thought, for fuck’s sake, I had a headache, Tel.” One of the men then clambered through the tiny hole to jemmy open 73 of the 550 safe deposit boxes, which they ransacked.
  • (8) He systematically ransacked Aboriginal burial grounds across at least two states.
  • (9) Earlier in the evening, a number of demonstrators attacked a branch of Starbucks, smashing its front windows and ransacking it before shattering the facade of a clothes shop.
  • (10) A Hague meeting with either Rouhani or Zarif could clear the way to restoring full diplomatic ties, which have not existed since the British embassy in Tehran was ransacked by a mob in November 2011.
  • (11) Residents of Kurhama village in eastern Kashmir said soldiers arrived trucks and entered dozens of homes, beat men and women, ransacked property and broke into shops.
  • (12) It attacked as “false” reports that offices in city hall had been ransacked by police as part of their search for documents.
  • (13) "Now that all the Muslim shops have been looted, ransacked and destroyed, prices have increased substantially."
  • (14) Hospitals were looted and non-governmental organisation offices ransacked as the insurgents declared Gao the capital of Azawad, or northern Mali .
  • (15) This would include delivery in schools and colleges, of course, but should embrace provision provided, for example, through study circles, which were organised by the TUC in the 1980s; the University of the Third Age and the opportunities that organisation has provided for retired people; and opportunities that have been provided for older people who have no qualifications to gain them through organisations like the Ransackers Association .
  • (16) The gang ransacked 73 boxes at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit after using a diamond-tipped drill to bore a hole into the vault wall over Easter weekend last year.
  • (17) A BBC correspondent in the city, Rana Jawad, tweeted: "In past 48 hrs many – if not majority – of apartments of Hay el Zohour compound on airport road have been ransacked acc to witnesses."
  • (18) The same article was successfully relied on by lawyers acting for Earl Daren Rodney, who was jailed for ransacking a hairdresser’s during the 2011 London riots.
  • (19) Four suspects wearing helmets and black clothing ransacked display cases inside the Jumeirah Carlton Tower hotel shortly after midnight and fled on two high-powered motorbikes.
  • (20) "They will ransack the village, but will probably be stopped at the city gates.