Destroying or killing a great proportion of the population (literally every tenth person)

Usage examples of decimation.

The collisions of all those peoples produced the tragedies of modern South Africa: the quick decimation of the Khoisan by European germs and guns.

Similar questions arise for the decimation of many other native peoples by Eurasian germs, as well as for the decimation of would-be European conquistadores in the tropics of Africa and Asia.

That, too, was a long Confederate tradition—city councils of besieged cities who surrendered before the wall was breached were subject to decimation, just as routed army units were.

Tsion taught that part of the popu lation decimation might be God's way of removing his most incorrigible enemies in anticipation of the coming epic battle.

Only since the recent decimation of another huge percentage of the population and the resulting personnel shortages had the place begun to evidence the lack.

Tsion taught that part of the population decimation might be God's way of removing his most incorrigible enemies in anticipation of the coming epic battle.

The Enfilade at Pale, the decimation of the Bridgeburners, the assault on Moon's Spawn.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Onearm's Host, in that time, was perhaps the finest army the Malazan Empire had yet to produce, even given the decimation of the Bridgeburners at the Siege of Pale.

Normal attrition due to disease, old age, accident, and mating battle kept the population fairly constant, even considering the decimations of the Hatching Hunts.

Even men vowed to poverty right often fall to the insistent temptation of silver and gold, and what with the decimations of the clergy by the Priests' Plague, not all of the men making up his insulating layers were men of the cloth, anyway.

Sane or insane were just stages of the great struggle going on everywhere all the time: across the valley, for instance, where the pines were fighting their way up the sides of the facing mountain, hurling the grenades of their cones into the thin soil, pressing their slow advantage, enduring the decimations of the lightning, aspiring (insanely, no doubt) toward the forever unreachable fastness of the summit.

Still, they come out of the earth in numbers that our decimations barely match.

The social situation in Quadling Country is such a mess, what with the decimation of the squelchy froglet population, but it may come back, in small measure, and there should be someone to oversee the ruby mines.

Communist hardliners in their time, and still hard in their hearts, they had seen their political ideologies and aspirations whittled away, Russia's status as a world leader diminished, and her armed might depleted to the point of decimation.

Then with a deadly accurate combination of five-inch naval gun and tank fire, the slow, systematic decimation of the Coastal Kommando began.