decimation

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.

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˌdɛsɪˈmeɪʃən/

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• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

decimation (countable and uncountable, plural decimations)

1. (strictly) The killing or punishment of every tenth person, usually by lot.
   • 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[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene v], 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, [...]

2. (generally) The killing or destruction of any large portion of a population.
   • 1702: Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana - And the whole army had cause to enquire into their own rebellions, when they saw the Lord of Hosts, with a dreadful decimation, taking off so many of our brethren by the worst 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.

3. A tithe or the act of tithing.
4. (mathematics) The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of a source sequence.
   1. (signal processing) A digital signal-processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal; downsampling

• (the act of killing or punishing each tenth person): tithing
• (the payment of a tenth to the clergy): See tithe

• (proportionate reduction, by single aliquot part): quintation (1/5), septimation (1/7), vicesimation (1/20), tricesimation (1/30), centesimation (1/100)

• decimate

• William Dwight Whitney and Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1914), “decimation”, in The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, volume II (D–Hoon), revised edition, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
• “decimation”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

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