decimation
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English
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin decimātiō, a punishment where every 10th man in a unit would be stoned to death by the men who were spared. Used by the Romans to keep order in their military. Compare septimation and vicesimation.
Pronunciation
- (UK, General American) IPA(key): /ˌdɛsɪˈmeɪʃən/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Rhymes: -eɪʃən
Noun
decimation (countable and uncountable, plural decimations)
- (Ancient Rome, strictly) The killing or punishment of every tenth person, usually by lot.
- Synonym: tithing
- c. 1605–1608, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Tymon of Athens”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (First Folio), London: Isaac Iaggard, and Ed Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, , page 98, column 1:
- By decimation and a tythed death; / If thy Reuenges hunger for that Food, / Which Nature loathes, take thou the deſtin'd tenth, […]
- (generally) The killing or destruction of any large portion of a population.
- 1702, Cotton Mather, “Book V (Acts and Monuments. )”, in Magnalia Christi Americana: Or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of Our Lord, 1698. , London: Thomas Parkhurst, , →OCLC, 4th part (The Reforming Synod of New-England, ), § 1, page 86, column 1:
- And the vvhole Army had cauſe to enquire into their own Rebellions, vvhen they ſavv the Lord of Hoſts, vvith a dreadful Decimation, taking off ſo many of our Brethren by the vvorſt of Executioners.
- 2021 September 8, “RMT on "war footing" in response to workforce cutback threats”, in RAIL, number 939, page 15:
- General Secretary Mick Lynch said: "It is crystal clear that the planned cutbacks on ScotRail and SWR are just the tip of the iceberg, as cynical employers use the cloak of COVID-19 to smuggle through the decimation of jobs and services on Britain's railways.
- A tithe or the act of tithing.
- (mathematics) The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of a source sequence.
- (signal processing) A digital signal-processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal; downsampling
Coordinate terms
- (proportionate reduction, by single aliquot part): quintation (1/5), septimation (1/7), vicesimation (1/20), tricesimation (1/30), centesimation (1/100)
Related terms
Translations
selection of every tenth person for death or other punishment
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killing or destruction of a large portion of a population
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tithing — see tithing
creation of a new sequence comprising every nth element of the original
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digital signal-processing technique
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References
- William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E Smith, editors (1914), “decimation”, in The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, revised edition, volumes II (D–Hoon), New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
- “decimation”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.