ransack

Definitions  ·  Examples  ·  Pronunciations  ·  Etymologies  ·  Related  ·  Statistics  ·  Comments  · 
“
He pounds home the point with the words of Patrick Henry, who said that unless properly restricted, tax collectors will "go into your cellars and rooms and search, ransack, and measure, everything you eat, drink, and wear."

View all »
Definitions (14)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (2)

  1. transitive verb To search or examine thoroughly.
  2. transitive verb To search carefully for plunder; pillage.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (7)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (3)

Toggle WordNet definitions WordNet (2)

Toggle elsewhere links Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (43)

  • He pounds home the point with the words of Patrick Henry, who said that unless properly restricted, tax collectors will "go into your cellars and rooms and search, ransack, and measure, everything you eat, drink, and wear." —  The Right Angle @ HumanEvents.com
  • If you are in mistrust about the integrity of your ransack, don't fire it. —  Find Free Articles - ArticlesBase
  • Choose worthy targets and ransack your imagination to come up with smart, true and amusing praise about them.
  • "When I was on my way there, the Secret Service called me and said they weren't going to ransack my house or anything … they just wanted to (walk through the house) and make sure I wasn't a part of any hate groups." —  QandO
  • At least eight people were killed and dozens injured in violence Thursday, the latest in over a week of protests carried out by organized youth groups in conjunction with departmental governors and other opposition leaders that also saw them sabotage a natural gas pipeline, vandalize government offices, ransack the offices of a human rights organization, and threaten to cut off natural gas exports to neighboring Brazil and Argentina. —  YubaNet.com
More examples »
 

Tags

ransack hasn't been tagged yet.

Sign up or sign in to add tags.

Stats

This word has been looked up 111 times.

stop updating
On Twitter

Photos from

flickr images

Add a related word »
Related

Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Allen's Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

Used in the same contextWord Family

ransack:   ransacking ·  ransacked
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (3)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. Middle English ransaken, from Old Norse rannsaka : rann, house + *saka, to search, seek; see sāg- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (2)

  1. Prop. ransake, the form ransack being due in part to association with sack, pillage (see def. 2); from Middle English ransaken, ransakyn, raunsaken, from Icelandic rannsaka (= Swedish Norwegian ransaka = Danish ransage), search a house, ransack, from rann (for *rasn), a house, abode (= Anglo-Saxon ræsn, a plank, ceiling, = Gothic (Moesogothic) razn, a house), + saka, fight, hurt, harm, apparently taken in this compound with the sense of the related sækja, seek, = Anglo-Saxon sēcan, seek: see seek and sake.
  2. Cf. Icelandic rannsak, rannsōkn, a ransacking; from the verb.
 

Pronunciations
Record your own »
/ˈrænsæk/
by American Heritage

Charts
frequency chart

Bubble size: how much this word was used in a year

Bubble height: used more or less than expected, vs. all uses evenly distributed

You can expect to see this word about once a year.

Recently looked up

elephantine · disheveled · Self-employed · Stiver · Sch

Recent Favorites

pygopagus · sanglant · Astacus · sweetbread · qualms

Recent Pronunciations

Glockenspiel · Ersatz · Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid · Haifischschwanzflossenfleischsuppe · Der Kottbusser Postkutscher putzt den Kottbusser Postkutschkasten