i had understood the word decimate to mean “to select by lot and kill every tenth person of” until fairly recently, when i’ve heard it used to describe a situation in which everyone has been killed or everything has been destroyed. when i first heard that “the city had been decimated,” i thought to myself, “well, that’s not so bad. only one tenth of it has been destroyed.” but then it occurred to me that the reporter was actually saying that the whole city had been destroyed. wow, those are two totally different things, one-tenth and ten-tenths! so i looked it up in the dictionary, and you know what? it means both!
1. to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague.
2. to select by lot and kill every tenth person of.
