Search the Dictionary

Desolation by violence; violent ruin or destruction; devastation; havoc; waste; as, the ravage of a lion; the ravages of fire or tempest; the ravages of an army, or of time. Would one think 't were possible for love To make such ravage in a noble soul Addison.

One who, or that which, ravages or lays waste; spoiler.

A pestilence which ravaged Europe and Asia in the fourteenth century.

An annual tax formerly laid on the English nation to buy off the ravages of Danish invaders, or to maintain forces to oppose them. It afterward became a permanent tax, raised by an assessment, at first of one shilling, afterward of two shillings, upon every hide of land throughout the realm. Wharton's Law Dict. Tomlins…

To lay waste; to ruin; to ravage; as, a fire desolates a city. Constructed in the very heart of a desolating war. Sparks.

To lay waste; to ravage; to desolate. Whole countries . . . were devastated. Macaulay.

llect food, esp. forage, for horses and cattle by feeding on or stripping the country; to ravage; to feed on spoil. His most mighty father on a hill Stood smiling to behold his lion's whelp Forage in blood of French nobility. Shak. Foraging ant (Zoöl.), one of several species of ants of the genus Eciton, very abundant…

To pillage; to ravage. He might foray our lands. Sir W. Scott.

To foray; to ravage; to pillage. For they that morn had forrayed all the land. Fairfax.

the Western grasshopper or locust (Caloptenus spretus), noted for the great extent of its ravages in the region beyond the Mississippi. In the Eastern United States the red-legged (Caloptenus femurrubrum and C. atlanis) are closely related species, but their ravages are less important. They are closely related to the m…

To take spoil; to plunder; to ravage. They were suffered to pillage wherever they went. Macaulay.

The act of devouring other creatures; ravage. Hog in sloth, fox in stealth, . . . lion in prey. Shak. Beast of prey, a carnivorous animal; one that feeds on the flesh of other animals.

Shriveled or shrunken; -- said especially of grain which has lost its juices from the ravages of insects, such as the wheat midge, or Trips (Thrips cerealium).

To ravage; to prevail without restraint, or with destruction or fatal effect; as, the plague raged in Cairo.

e pillage or plunder, as of a town or city; the storm and plunder of a town; devastation; ravage. The town was stormed, and delivered up to sack, -- by which phrase is to be understood the perpetration of all those outrages which the ruthless code of war allowed, in that age, on the persons and property of the defensel…