decimate
A tithe or other 10% tax or payment.
Noun
- A tithe or other 10% tax or payment.
- A tenth of something.
- A set of ten items.
Origin
The verb is first attested in 1591, the noun in 1641; borrowed from Latin decimātus, perfect passive participle of decimō (“to kill one tenth; to tithe”) (see, from -ate (verb-forming suffix) and -ate (noun-forming suffix)), from decimus (“tenth”) + -ō (verb-forming suffix). As a noun, via Latin decimatus (“tithing area; tithing rights”).
Forms
Verb
- To kill one-tenth of (a group), (historical, specifically) as a military punishment in the Roman army selected by lot, usually carried out by the surviving soldiers.
- God sometimes decimates or tithes delinquent persons, and they died for a common crime, according as God hath cast their lot in the decrees of predestination. - c. 1650, Jeremy Taylor, Vol. I
- Said to have been martyred as a Christian legionary commander of late Roman times for having refused an imperial order to kill one in ten (that is, decimate in the Roman meaning of the word) of the soldiers of another...
- ...where Caesar threatened to disband Legio X after a mutiny. The men begged him to decimate them instead, and Caesar relented in the same way that Titus refrained from executing this cavalryman after his comrades’...
Synonyms: tithe
- To destroy or remove one-tenth of (something).
- ...there will be eight hundred and ten laborers producing as nine hundred, while, to accomplish their purpose, they would have to produce as one thousand... Here, then, we have a society which is continually decimating...
- To devastate: to reduce or destroy significantly but not completely.
- [England] had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle, and led to no result. - p. 1856, James Froude, History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth:
- Um, some sort of power overload. I'm afraid it decimated your breakfast. - 1996, Star Trek: Voyager (TV series), Flashback (episode)
- They can be devastating to certain plants if left uncontrolled: a downy mildew of grapes decimated European vineyards during the nineteenth century. - 2001, Otis C. Maloy, Timothy D. Murray, et al., Encyclopedia of...
- To exact a tithe or other 10% tax.
- You forge theſe things prettily; but I have heard you are as poor as a decimated Cavalier [referring to Cromwell's ten per cent. income-tax on Cavaliers], and had not one foot of land in all the vvorld. - 1667 (revival...
- In addition, an ordinance was published that “all who had ever borne arms for the king, or declared themselves to be of the royal party, should be decimated, that is, pay a tenth part of all the estate which they had...
- To tithe: to pay a 10% tax.
- [I]t is a deed of higheſt charitie to help undeceive the people, and a vvork vvorthieſt your autoritie, in all things els authors, aſſertors and novv recoverers of our libertie, to deliver us, the only people of all...
- To divide into tenths; to decimalize.
- For example, in multiplying 3 by 0.2, the 3 units have to be decimated—that is, divided into 10 equal parts, obtaining 3 “deci-units” for each part, and then 2 such parts taken, giving as the answer 6 deci-units, or...
- To reduce to one-tenth: to destroy or remove nine-tenths of (something).
- In this dramatic picture, the nation is literally decimated, and even the tenth which remains is subjected to a further destruction. - 1998, H. Wayne House, editor, Israel, the Land and the People, page 63:
- African slaves were needed to replace Native American populations that had been decimated (literally reduced to one-tenth their size) by European conquest. - 2003, Susan S. Hunter, Black Death, page 58:
- In the New World, European colonists initially enslaved Native Americans, decimating the indigenous populations to one-tenth of their original sizes. - 2005, Wilma A. Dunaway, “Put in Master’s Pocket”, in Appalachians...
- To replace (a high-resolution model) with another of lower but acceptable quality. (Usually algorithmically)
- A decimate tool allows us to obtain a more coarse-grained view of the data over the full n-dimensional space. - 1999, Mihalisin & al., "Visualizing Multivariate Functions, Data and Distributions" in Readings in...
- However, many times it is more practical to decimate existing high-res models because of time, money or manpower issues. - 2001, Inside 3Ds Max 4, page 56:
- Given this initial fine mesh, we smooth and decimate it to a desired mesh resolution. - 2004, Geremy Heitz et al., “Automatic Generation of Shape Models using Nonrigid Registration with a Single Segmented Template...