Pillage
noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The spoils of war. countable, uncountable
"Which pillage they with merry march bring home."
- 2 the act of stealing valuable things from a place wordnet
- 3 The act of pillaging. countable, uncountable
"An employee at a brewery in Kinshasa rated the aftermath as more catastrophic to the company than the direct violence: It was more the consequences of the pillages that hit Bracongo – the poverty of the people, our friends who buy beer."
- 4 goods or money obtained illegally wordnet
- 1 To loot or plunder by force, especially in time of war. ambitransitive
"1911, Sabine Baring-Gould, Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe, Chapter VI: Cliff Castles—Continued, Archibald V. (1361-1397) was Count of Perigord. He was nominally under the lilies [France], but he pillaged indiscriminately in his county."
- 2 steal goods; take as spoils wordnet
Example
More examples"France began to pillage Algeria in 1830."
Etymology
From Old French pillage, from piller (“plunder”), from an unattested meaning of Late Latin piliō, probably a figurative use of Latin pilō (“I remove (hair)”), from pilus (“hair”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.