Decimation

The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
  • noun. A tithing; specifically, an income-tax of 10 per cent. levied on the Cavaliers by Cromwell.
  • noun. A selection of every tenth by lot, as for punishment, etc.
  • noun. The destruction of a great but indefinite number or proportion of people, as of an army or of the inhabitants of a country; a heavy loss of life.
    • the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
  • noun. A tithing.
  • noun. A selection of every tenth person by lot, as for punishment.
  • noun. The destruction of any large proportion, as of people by pestilence or war.
    • Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
  • noun. The killing or destruction of a large portion of a population.
  • noun. A tithing.
  • noun. A selection of every tenth person by lot, as for punishment.
  • noun. The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of the original sequence.
  • noun. A digital signal processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal.
    • WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
  • noun. destroying or killing a large part of the population (literally every tenth person as chosen by lot)
    • Word Usage
    "Five hundred men were caught shirking their duty; one out of every ten was selected for execution, which is why the procedure was called decimation analogous to our word decimal, that is, one-tenth."
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