Holocaust vs Decimate - What's the difference?
holocaust | decimate |
A sacrifice that is completely burned to ashes.
* 1526 , William Tyndale, trans. Bible , Mark XII:
* 1646 , Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica , III.3:
The annihilation or near-annihilation of a group of animals or people, whether by natural or deliberate agency.
The state-sponsored mass murder of an ethnic group. In particular, the Holocaust (which see ).
An inferno or fire disaster.
(Roman history) To kill one man chosen by lot out of every ten in a legion or other military group.
* ; from volume 1 of an 1835 edition of his works):
* 1989 , Basil Davidson, The Ancient World and Africa,'' in ''Egypt Revisited, edited by Ivan Van Sertima ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=IwEZ3-QtsDEC&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&sig=CXM6Xb5lVuNuDNE7iYDzggSPgg4]):
* 1998 , Adrian Goldsworthy, The Roman Army at War ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=55KE-nNtTRUC&pg=PA263&lpg=PA263&sig=pp2fv17oynz5w73_Cq1kKV3YgKI]):
To reduce anything by one in ten, or ten percent.
* 2007 , Russell T Davies, The Sound of Drums'', episode 12 of revived series 3 of ''Doctor Who :
* 1840 , P J Proudhon, ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=zVx5JLepYrsC&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&sig=NuyvXEikIdgZAnc17xlO_irqsm0]):
(historical) To exact a tithe or tax of 10 percent.
* 1669 , , The wild gallant :
* 1819 , (John Lingard), History of England ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=_oyv8qYm2p0C&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&sig=YkvtlMBSnPMQR9CNBVeJ6ZYKFuc]):
To reduce to one-tenth.
* 1998 , Israel, the Land and the People, edited by H Wayne House ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=cYAJwOR_WucC&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&sig=JdWxs7ANZdt2Rsf8l3XvrufbUEY]):
* 2000 , Louise Redd, Hangover Soup ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=QQhiV7Q86WwC&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&sig=af0g5hwuqIQ25x5HDgZ989XlV6A]):
* 2003 , Susan S. Hunter, Black Death ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=wRd8QpoVGtQC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&sig=VrjLlpEwSjIhvixx3vw_5zKJHVY]):
* 1788 , Edward Gibbon, History of (the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) volume 4 ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=NaILpSlC-b0C&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&sig=RsQ4cf_TT_xkB1fHypjbWWAi1o4]):
* 2005 , Wilma A. Dunaway, Put in Master’s Pocket'', in ''Appalachians and Race , edited by John C Inscoe ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=hea586e-L0QC&pg=PA116&lpg=PA116&sig=X4GTYsenkf2pcv9rXG9dvFOep1k]):
To severely reduce; to destroy almost completely.
* , History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth :
* 2004 , Adrian Goldsworthy, In the Name of Rome ([http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=TdKqfF9u4WQC&pg=PA245&lpg=PA245&sig=qrUZwfkR44lgJz-TrvZpYbrjSDI]):
(computer graphics) To replace a high-resolution model with one of lower resolution but acceptably similar appearance.
* 1999 , Mihalisin, Timlin and Schwegler in Visualizing Multivariate Functions, Data and Distributions'', collected in ''Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think , ISBN 1558605339, page 122:
* 2001 , Inside 3Ds Max 4 , edited by Kim Lee, ISBN 0735710945, page 56:
* 2004 , Geremy Heitz, Torsten Rohlfing and Calvin Maurer in Automatic Generation of Shape Models using Nonrigid Registration with a Single Segmented Template Mesh'' collected in ''Vision Modeling and Visualization 2004 ISBN 1586034723, page 74:
As a proper noun holocaust
is (historical|narrowly) the systematic mass murder (genocide) of 6 million jews perpetrated by nazi germany shortly before and during world war ii.As a verb decimate is
(roman history) to kill one man chosen by lot out of every ten in a legion or other military group.holocaust
English
Noun
(en noun)- And to love a mans nehbour as hymsilfe, ys a greater thynge then all holocaustes and sacrifises.
- in the holocaust or burnt-offering of Moses, the gall was cast away: for, as Ben Maimon instructeth, the inwards, whereto the gall adhereth, were taken out with the crop (according unto the law,) which the priest did not burn, but cast unto the east [...].
- nuclear holocaust
- a nuclear holocaust
Usage notes
* Use of the word holocaust to depict Jewish suffering under the Nazis dates back to 1942, according to the OED. By the 1970s, The Holocaust'' was often synonymous with the Jewish exterminations. This use of the term as a synonym for the Jewish exterminations has been criticised because it appears to imply that there was a voluntary religious purpose behind the Nazi actions, which was not the case from either the Nazis' perspective or the victims'. Hence, some people prefer the term ''Shoah'', which means ''destruction . * The word continues to be used in its other senses. For example, part of the action of a BBC radio drama by James Follett in 1981 takes place in “Holocaust City”, which by inference was named because the inhabitants were the only survivors of a global nuclear war. * For more information on the use of the term Holocaust'', see the entry ''Holocaust .See also
* burnt offering * ethnic cleansing * pogromReferences
* Lewis M. Paternoster and Ruth Frager-Stone, Three Dimensions of Vocabulary Growth, second edition (Amsco School Publications, 1998) *Oxford Dictionary: holocaust* * ----
decimate
English
Verb
(decimat)- 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.
- 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 legion which had gone into revolt
- 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’ appeal.
- Shall we decimate them? That sounds good, nice word. Remove one-tenth of the population!
- Out of nine hundred, ninety will be ejected, that the production of the others may be increased one-tenth. Here, then, we have a society which is continually decimating itself[.]
- 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 world.
- 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 left, to support the charge which the commonwealth was put to
- In this dramatic picture, the nation is literally decimated , and even the tenth which remains is subjected to a further destruction.
- comments about the Rangers’ decimated' pitching staff. Jay commented to the other drunks that although the word '''''decimated is often used to mean “demolished” or “destroyed,” it literally means “reduced to one-tenth of its former number.”
- African slaves were needed to replace Native American populations that had been decimated (literally reduced to one-tenth their size) by European conquest.
- Yet such population [viz. 300,000 males slain] is incredible; and the second or third city of Italy need not repine if we only decimate the numbers of the present text. Both Milan and Genoa revived in less than thirty years.
- In the New World, European colonists initially enslaved Native Americans, decimating the indigenous populations to one-tenth of their original sizes.
- It [England] had decimated itself for a question which involved no principle, and led to no result.
- He then declared that he would decimate Legio IX, but allowed himself to be ‘persuaded’ by the pleas of officers and men only to execute twelve of the 120 soldiers seen as ringleaders.
- A decimate tool allows us to obtain a more coarse-grained view of the data over the full (n)-dimensional space.
- However, many times it is more practical to decimate existing high-res models because of time, money or manpower issues.
- Given this initial fine mesh, we smooth and decimate it to a desired mesh resolution.
Usage notes
The definition reduce by one in ten'' is occasionally cited as "the correct" definition, with ''severely reduce'' considered a misconception, arrived at by reading ''decimate'' as to reduce to''' one-tenth rather than ' by one-tenth. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage states that the nonspecific use of this word to mean devastate'' or ''severely reduce the numbers of is "nowadays the commonest use of the word in both British and American English, and it’s registered without comment in modern dictionaries." It also advises against using numbers with the term, as "They are redundant where it means 'reduce by one tenth', and where it doesn't they confound the arithmetic."[http://print.google.com/print?hl=en&id=UA5syoe1kc0C&pg=PA144&lpg=PA144&sig=iBI36wGnmi-L71sDwui_l-rUwJs] The23 occurrences of decimate in the British National Corpus] — compare [http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=decimates decimates], [http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=decimated decimated], and [http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=decimating decimating— almost all clearly accord with the nonspecific sense. The only references to the historical sense are two complaints about modern usage and its critics. Neither of these actually uses the term to mean "reduce by one-tenth".