What is "decimations"

Usage examples of "decimations".

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.