Pronounced: KLER-uh-hyoo, noun
Notes: I save off words to use in these posts; this word I ran across nine years ago, and I don’t remember it at all.
Yesterday’s word
The word depredate means
- to lay waste; plunder; ravage
- to engage in plunder
First usage
Our word came into English in the early 1600s
Background / Comments
As I noted yesterday, I get our word confused with “deprecate” (I think of it as meaning “belittle”, but it has other meanings). When I read the meaning, it did sound familiar, so I may have run across it. I confess that I don’t really understand the shades of difference in the two meanings: what is the difference between “plundering” something and “engaging in plundering” something?). Our word came from the Latin verb praedari (to plunder). Our word is most commonly used to refer to nature, when a methodical – sort of automatic – destruction of life occurs.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 