Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The ability to destroy; destructiveness: as, “seismic destructivity can be accurately expressed in mechanical units,”

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It’s kind of a recurring theme, actually – Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, etc, etc. – but that kind of self-destructivity is usually characterized as, you know, problematic.

    Five Reasons You Should Totally See That Vampire Movie | Her Bad Mother 2009

  • It shows, through compelling detail and pointed animation, consumerism's incredible destructivity and toxicity, in all levels of the cradle-to-grave chain: extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal.

    the story of stuff jlundberg 2007

  • * Quick aside: the first time I ever noticed the connection between creativity and destructivity, if you will, came when I was drawing with some crayons as a kid.

    December 20th, 2005 2005

  • In any case the issue is not one of being more right but of establishing ways to come to grips with the destructivity that generates racism.

    Psychohistory Kovel, Joel 1972

  • Despite a conspiracy of silence about the steps which every major power has taken to ensure that its potentials in relation to "biological warfare" are not neglected, the diligent reader may even have learned that the Big Bad Bomb may be surpassed in daemonic destructivity by the Poor Power's Poison.

    The Dangers of the Nuclear Age 1959

  • And he mistrusted her, he was afraid of a woman capable of such abandon, such dangerous thoroughness of destructivity.

    Women in Love 1907

  • "Pause the Tragic Ending" is one of her darkest songs, which delves into the intricacies of needing someone to the point of destructivity.

    News-Letter 2008

  • Elizabeth is transformed into the "mummy" that Victor refuses to acknowledge and that drives his creativity/destructivity (40). [

    Attached to Reading: Mary Shelley's Psychical Reality 2008

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