Associations to the word «Decimation»

Wiktionary

DECIMATION, noun. The killing or destruction of a large portion of a population.
DECIMATION, noun. A tithing.
DECIMATION, noun. A selection of every tenth person by lot, as for punishment.
DECIMATION, noun. (mathematics) The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of the original sequence.
DECIMATION, noun. (telecommunications) A digital signal processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal.

Dictionary definition

DECIMATION, noun. Destroying or killing a large part of the population (literally every tenth person as chosen by lot).

Wise words

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne