Crossword clues for destruct
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Destruct \De*struct"\, v. t. [L. destructus, p. p. of destruere.
See Destroy.]
To destroy. [Obs.]
--Mede.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"to destroy," 1958, probably a back-formation from destruction in the jargon of U.S. aerospace and defense workers to refer to deliberate destruction of a missile in flight by a friendly agent; popularized 1966 in form self-destruct in the voice-over at the beginning of popular TV spy drama "Mission Impossible." OED records an isolated use of destruct from 17c., in this case probably from Latin destruct-, past participle stem of destruere.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context transitive English) To intentionally cause the destruction of. 2 (context intransitive English) To self-destruct.
WordNet
v. destroy (one's own missile or rocket); "The engineers had to destruct the rocket for safety reasons"
do away with, cause the destruction or undoing of; "The fire destroyed the house" [syn: destroy]
Usage examples of "destruct".
Our cyberneticist is questioning the artificial intelligence in the Whisper Ship, to see if there is any hidden delay in its destruct sequence.
They tripped a destruct sequence and another hypersphere of radiation blossomed beneath the skein.
If the reception of his heartbeat was interrupted for more than one minute, Sun was programmed to feed a destruct order, via microwave, to the microsphere computers in all of the New People.
A remote destruct existed, but its use might have been construed by the Shroud as an act of aggression, something no one wanted to risk.
An annihilatory destruct would rip the planet in half and so antagonise the Dra'Azon.
He was to learn that only three of those detents were destruct mechanisms, and that the one electrical booby trap he did not find, had corroded harmlessly.
Then there came rumours, through some of the refugee craft of neutrals fleeing the hostilities, of a knot of Idiran fleets swarming round a volume of space near a recent raid location on the very outskirts of the galaxy, followed by a furious battle culminating in a gigantic annihilatory explosion, whose signature, when it was finally picked up and analysed, was exactly that produced when a beleaguered military GSV of the Culture had had time to orchestrate a maximally extraneously damaging destruct sequence.
You wait and see: if the Soviets ever open the books and let us compare duds and destructs, you'll find out they had a failure rate much higher than ours.
That done, she harnessed on a life-support tank and donned her headgear and the water-aids, then punched the destruct on her ship's instrumentation and threw open the escape hatch.
I replaced the cover, shoved the lever to the safe position: and now the destruct box was armed and it only awaited the closing of the solenoid switch to complete the suicide circuit.