Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The act of despoiling or the condition of being despoiled.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of despoiling, stripping, or plundering.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A stripping or plundering; spoliation.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A stripping or
plundering ;spoliation .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the act of stripping and taking by force
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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That way leads to technological despoliation, as we already know.
Books, Ebooks and the Environment « Tales from the Reading Room 2010
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Outpost, Tue to 21 AugSSWorking from his native Benin, Romuald Hazoumè has used the ubiquitous jerry can as his trademark emblem for capitalism, consumerism and ecological despoliation.
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Even today, some so-called Christians give their stamp of approval on cuts in crucial government programs that serve poor families, or the despoliation of the land by oil companies in the name of economic growth.
David A. Love: The Incompatibility Of Christianity And American Capitalism David A. Love 2011
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Because of our sins, our desecration and despoliation, we witness in our own times the destruction of a universe.
Rabbi Barry A. Kenter: For Our Sins, We Were Exiled From The Land Rabbi Barry A. Kenter 2011
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This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new.
Darkness Too Visible Meghan Cox Gurdon 2011
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But when the late Saro-Wiwa changed his focus to the despoliation of the delta, suddenly it became the cause du jour of the environmental movement and international journalists.
Nigeria at 50 Roger Bate 2010
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By the time Katherine R. Tsiang visited the temple caves of Xiangtangshan in 1990, the sixth-century complex bore witness to both the Northern Qi's glorious sculpture and its irrevocable despoliation by looters and traders.
Gaining Enlightenment Through Technology Lee Lawrence 2011
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By the time Katherine R. Tsiang visited the temple caves of Xiangtangshan in 1990, the sixth-century complex bore witness to both the Northern Qi's glorious sculpture and its irrevocable despoliation by looters and traders.
Gaining Enlightenment Through Technology Lee Lawrence 2011
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So I propose that the Scottish Green party makes itself useful for a change and begins a campaign to stop the tartan despoliation of other people's places and stick to despoiling their own.
What next? A stag weekend on Kilimanjaro? | Kevin McKenna 2011
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Because of our sins, our desecration and despoliation, we witness in our own times the destruction of a universe.
Rabbi Barry A. Kenter: For Our Sins, We Were Exiled From The Land Rabbi Barry A. Kenter 2011
bilby commented on the word despoliation
"But the thought that one is wasting one’s life is not a cheerful one, and respectable citizens everywhere have gone to considerable lengths to avoid it. They have erected elaborate architectures of lies and self-deceptions in an attempt to persuade themselves and others that their work is not petty nonsense directed by contemptible bosses to idiotic ends, that their families are not desolate bunkers of mutual contempt and shared incarceration, that their leisure and friendships are not collections of inconsequential games and insubstantial interests, that their holidays are not banal tramps through despoliation, that the ways in which they think they avoid the common vulgarity are not entirely spurious, that their pleasures are not dreadfully small."
- Wayne Spencer, Consumable Youth Rebellion, adbusters.org, 27 Oct 2010.
January 19, 2013