English

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Etymology

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Borrowed from Latin decimātiō, a punishment where every 10th man in a unit would be stoned to death by the men who were spared. Used by the Romans to keep order in their military. Compare septimation and vicesimation.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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decimation (countable and uncountable, plural decimations)

  1. (Ancient Rome, strictly) The killing or punishment of every tenth person, usually by lot.
    Synonym: tithing
  2. (generally) The killing or destruction of any large portion of a population.
    • 1702, Cotton Mather, “Book V (Acts and Monuments. [])”, in Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698. [], London: [] Thomas Parkhurst, [], →OCLC, 4th part (The Reforming Synod of New-England, []), § 1, page 86, column 1:
      And the vvhole Army had cauſe to enquire into their own Rebellions, vvhen they ſavv the Lord of Hoſts, vvith a dreadful Decimation, taking off ſo many of our Brethren by the vvorſt of Executioners.
    • 2021 September 8, “RMT on "war footing" in response to workforce cutback threats”, in RAIL, number 939, page 15:
      General Secretary Mick Lynch said: "It is crystal clear that the planned cutbacks on ScotRail and SWR are just the tip of the iceberg, as cynical employers use the cloak of COVID-19 to smuggle through the decimation of jobs and services on Britain's railways.
  3. A tithe or the act of tithing.
  4. (mathematics) The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of a source sequence.
    1. (signal processing) A digital signal-processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal; downsampling

Coordinate terms

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Translations

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References

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Anagrams

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Note 1