What's the difference between pillage and spoil?

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.

Spoil


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To plunder; to strip by violence; to pillage; to rob; -- with of before the name of the thing taken; as, to spoil one of his goods or possession.
  • (v. t.) To seize by violence;; to take by force; to plunder.
  • (v. t.) To cause to decay and perish; to corrput; to vitiate; to mar.
  • (v. t.) To render useless by injury; to injure fatally; to ruin; to destroy; as, to spoil paper; to have the crops spoiled by insects; to spoil the eyes by reading.
  • (v. i.) To practice plunder or robbery.
  • (v. i.) To lose the valuable qualities; to be corrupted; to decay; as, fruit will soon spoil in warm weather.
  • (n.) That which is taken from another by violence; especially, the plunder taken from an enemy; pillage; booty.
  • (n.) Public offices and their emoluments regarded as the peculiar property of a successful party or faction, to be bestowed for its own advantage; -- commonly in the plural; as to the victor belong the spoils.
  • (n.) That which is gained by strength or effort.
  • (n.) The act or practice of plundering; robbery; aste.
  • (n.) Corruption; cause of corruption.
  • (n.) The slough, or cast skin, of a serpent or other animal.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli said she would not let comments about her appearance by the BBC presenter John Inverdale spoil the greatest day of her life.
  • (2) In a ruling rejecting any claims to the "spoils of war," New York's highest court concluded Thursday that an ancient gold tablet must be returned to the German museum that lost it in the Second world war .
  • (3) Acanthamoeba culbertsoni was isolated from a sewage-spoil dump site near Ambrose Light, New York Bight.
  • (4) We tested 1,145 isolates from fresh and spoiling irradiated (0.0, 0.3, and 0.6 Mrad) yellow perch fillets for proteolytic activity, by the use of both media.
  • (5) The few who enjoy themselves thoughtlessly, going against the green Glastonbury ethos , spoil it for the many.
  • (6) Spoiled fish of the families, Scombridae and Scomberesocidae (e.g.
  • (7) Spoiling periods of ca 1-2 ms with driving currents of ca 0.5-1.0 A are predicted to be adequate for surface-spoiling experiments with rat, e.g., for noninvasive monitoring of liver.
  • (8) Magnetic resonance arteriograms of healthy volunteers and selected patients were produced with a new spoiled gradient-echo pulse sequence based on time-of-flight phenomena.
  • (9) In the spoiled samples, the highest total counts were 820 million in buttermilk biscuits.
  • (10) Hagenbeck’s zoo would be a celebration of the German colonial project and its spoils, from German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) to German East Africa (present-day Burundi, Rwanda and mainland Tanzania).
  • (11) Facebook Twitter Pinterest The spoils of war: pro-Russia rebels recover a tank (left) abandoned by retreating Ukrainian troops.
  • (12) Deliberately spoiled mackerel samples and mackerel samples implicated in outbreaks of scombrotoxicosis were, under medical supervision, tested blind on normal, healthy volunteers of both sexes.
  • (13) So far the Republican primary has spoiled us, from Rick Perry's "oops" to corporate asset-stripper Mitt Romney's admission that he liked firing people, delivered just before he was snapped apparently receiving a sit-down shoe-shine from an underling – not a good look for a would-be man of the people.
  • (14) Magnetic resonance angiography of the pulmonary vasculature was evaluated in 12 subjects using breath-hold gradient echo scans and surface coils at 1.5 T. Flow-compensated GRASS, spoiled GRASS (SPGR), and WARP-SPGR sequences were utilized.
  • (15) Mawer said some junior members may have been paid a fee, with bigger fish getting a share of the spoils.
  • (16) This magnificent quintet of gems was, alas, the sum total of the factual and subjective spoils of which the committee was able to relieve him over two-and-a-half long hours.
  • (17) Economics didn't start out trying to spoil our fun.
  • (18) Sid Ward, teacher, 38, Kingsbridge, Devon (now living in Herefordshire) ‘Properties are empty, so the community is empty’ Second homes destroy the fabric of the town and spoil the very things that made it attractive to the second home owner in the first place.
  • (19) But Pence, close observers said, simply advocated such ideas ahead of their time, at a moment when Republican leadership still feared that the “war on women” label would spoil their standing with the public in the 2012 election.
  • (20) The script was written but Burnley spoiled Cole and Lambert’s happy ending.