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Any cause of ruin, or lasting injury; harm; woe. Money, thou bane of bliss, and source of woe. Herbert.

To make bankrupt; to bring financial ruin upon; to impoverish.

lighting influence, which destroys or causes to fail; to visit with a curse; to curse; to ruin; as, to blast pride, hopes, or character. I'll cross it, though it blast me. Shak. Blasted with excess of light. T. Gray.

Hence: To destroy the happiness of; to ruin; to mar essentially; to frustrate; as, to blight one's prospects. Seared in heart and lone and blighted. Byron.

ertain temperance or total abstinence organizations, as of the Blue ribbon Army. -- Blue ruin, utter ruin; also, gin. [Eng. Slang] Carlyle. -- Blue spar (Min.), azure spar; lazulite. See Lazulite. -- Blue thrush (Zoöl.), a European and Asiatic thrush (Petrocossyphus cyaneas). -- Blue verditer. See Verditer. -- Blu…

a ship, or the master as his agent, hypothecates and binds the ship (and sometimes the accruing freight) as security for the repayment of money advanced or lent for the use of the ship, if she terminates her voyage successfully. If the ship is lost by perils of the sea, the lender loses the money; but if the ship arriv…

To destroy the financial credit of; to make bankrupt; to ruin. With arts like these rich Matho, when he speaks, Attracts all fees, and little lawyers breaks. Dryden.

A breach; ruin; downfall; peril. [Obs.] Chaucer.

rder; as, the brink of a chasm. Also Fig. "The brink of vice." Bp. Porteus. "The brink of ruin." Burke. The plashy brink of weedy lake. Bryant.

Crushed and ruined as by something that destroys hope; blighted. "Her broken love and life." G. Eliot.

To support or sustain; to preserve from sinking into ruin or despondency. Those old prejudices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and title. Burke.

Care; anxiety; diligence. [Obs.] Chaucer. To do one's business, to ruin one. [Colloq.] Wycherley. -- To make (a thing) one's business, to occupy one's self with a thing as a special charge or duty. [Colloq.] -- To mean business, to be earnest. [Colloq.]

Of the nature of cant; affected; vulgar. To introduce and multiply cant words in the most ruinous corruption in any language. Swift.

One who is ruined; one who has made moral shipwreck; a reprobate. Lest . . . when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. 1 Cor. ix. 27.

a comparatively light and worthless character; the refuse part of anything. The chaff and ruin of the times. Shak.

b and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture galleries, palaces, and ruins, is termed by them [the Italians] a cicerone, or a Cicero. Trench.

vilization. [Obs.] Monarchies have risen from barbarrism to civility, and fallen again to ruin. Sir J. Davies. The gradual depature of all deeper signification from the word civility has obliged the creation of another word -- civilization. Trench.

ually in a bad sense. A combination of the most powerful men in Rome who had conspired my ruin. Melmoth.

evise; to generate; to originate; as, to conceive a purpose, plan, hope. It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life. Gibbon. Conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. Is. lix. 13.

nd viewa; accordance in a scheme; harmony; simultaneous action. All these discontens, how ruinous soever, have arisen from the want of a due communication and concert. Swift.