Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The act of despoiling or the condition of being despoiled.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The act of despoiling, stripping, or plundering.
Wiktionary
- n. A stripping or plundering; spoliation.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A stripping or plundering; spoliation.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the act of stripping and taking by force
Etymologies
- Late Latin dēspoliātiō, dēspoliātiōn-, from Latin dēspoliātus, past participle of dēspoliāre, to despoil; see despoil. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“By the time Katherine R. Tsiang visited the temple caves of Xiangtangshan in 1990, the sixth-century complex bore witness to both the Northern Qi's glorious sculpture and its irrevocable despoliation by looters and traders.”
The Wall Street Journal: Gaining Enlightenment Through Technology
“So I propose that the Scottish Green party makes itself useful for a change and begins a campaign to stop the tartan despoliation of other people's places and stick to despoiling their own.”
The Guardian: What next? A stag weekend on Kilimanjaro? | Kevin McKenna
“But when the late Saro-Wiwa changed his focus to the despoliation of the delta, suddenly it became the cause du jour of the environmental movement and international journalists.”
“Even today, some so-called Christians give their stamp of approval on cuts in crucial government programs that serve poor families, or the despoliation of the land by oil companies in the name of economic growth.”
The Huffington Post: David A. Love: The Incompatibility Of Christianity And American Capitalism
“This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new.”
“Because of our sins, our desecration and despoliation, we witness in our own times the destruction of a universe.”
The Huffington Post: Rabbi Barry A. Kenter: For Our Sins, We Were Exiled From The Land
“That way leads to technological despoliation, as we already know.”
Books, Ebooks and the Environment « Tales from the Reading Room
“Outpost, Tue to 21 AugSSWorking from his native Benin, Romuald Hazoumè has used the ubiquitous jerry can as his trademark emblem for capitalism, consumerism and ecological despoliation.”
“It is my annoyance that the sexual violation part of "rape" has been appropriated in a fashion that does not refer to the despoliation of a countryside (the Rape of Nanking) or to the sudden seizure of an object/person (the Rape of Ganymede), but instead to the sexual act that lies at the heart of my response.”
“The despoliation of traditional Ogoni land in the Niger Delta inspired Saro-Wiwa to lead an international, nonviolent campaign targeting Shell.”
The Huffington Post: The Free Market's Marked Men, From The Niger Delta To The Amazon
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘despoliation’.
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phrontistery - d
from phrontistery.info
dacnomania, dacoitage, dacryops, dactylioglyph, dactyliology, dactyliomancy, dactylogram, dactylography, dactyloid, dactylology, dactylomancy, dactylomegaly and 624 more...
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Vocabulary
Words I come across while reading.
talus, echelon, onanistic, cabochon, avocation, charnel, moue, portentous, prolixity, astringent, hoary, patina and 165 more...
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Jigsaw Codex
List? What list?
This is the list that makes up the world.cat, boustrophedon, syndetic, life, imbroglio, interlude, composition, investigation, cantankerous, him, sign, universality and 189 more...
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Words I Don't Know
acrimonious, creosote, alacrity, erudite, scrip, apocryphal, homunculus, quixotic, doggerel, despoliation, egress, asperity and 2 more...
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Words from the News
Interesting words culled from my daily combing through blogs, news, and media.
Tweets
Looking for tweets for despoliation.
bilby "But the thought that one is wasting one’s life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They have erected elaborate architectures of lies and self-deceptions in an attempt to persuade themselves and others that their work is not petty nonsense directed by contemptible bosses to idiotic ends, that their families are not desolate bunkers of mutual contempt and shared incarceration, that their leisure and friendships are not collections of inconsequential games and insubstantial interests, that their holidays are not banal tramps through despoliation, that the ways in which they think they avoid the common vulgarity are not entirely spurious, that their pleasures are not dreadfully small."
- Wayne Spencer, Consumable Youth Rebellion, adbusters.org, 27 Oct 2010. Jan 19, 2013