- 1
A depredation is an act of taking things by force or of wrecking them — a raid, a plunder, a tearing-apart. We often meet it in the plural: the depredations of an army, of a storm, of insects or wild pigs in a field. It is a formal, slightly old-fashioned word; history books and serious news like it. It is not the everyday word for stealing (that is steal or rob). Though actually, it is not only about people: weather and animals “commit depredations” in this style of English, because the picture is of something hunting, stripping, and leaving damage behind.
掠奪；摧殘
組成From Middle French déprédation, from Latin depraedatio. The old root is the same idea as prey: seizing what you hunt. The de- here pushes that “seize and strip” meaning.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
depredationnoun/ˌdɛpɹəˈdeɪʃən/
- 1
An act of consuming agricultural resources (crops, livestock), especially as plunder.
- An animal that produces only two to four young per year cannot suffer vast depredations on the adult population without drastic effects.
- Depredation of cultivated crops by elephants is widespread in both Africa and Asia.
- 2
A raid or predatory attack.
- Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had long known that his fragile supply and communication lines through Tennessee were in serious jeopardy because of depredations by Forrest's cavalry raids. (Battle of Brice's Crossroads)
- Despite losing its overall roof to the depredations of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, the main building survives in all its Gothic glory.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。