How to Use despoil in a Sentence

despoil

verb

• The landscape has been despoiled by industrial development.
• The snake had entered Eden, to despoil all that was innocent.
  — Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ, 27 June 2019
• Even a comparative smidgen of methane can despoil the climate.
  — Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, 28 Oct. 2021
• The culprits despoiled art and defaced American icons under cover of night.
  — Stu Bykofsky, Philly.com, 30 Aug. 2017
• Sitting Bull was a Sioux chief who saw his people slaughtered, despoiled, and dispossessed before he himself was killed.
  — Marc-Olivier Bherer, Harper's magazine, 10 May 2019
• The people whose class envy and resentment extends to a desire to despoil the rich at death are not Trump voters but the New York Times’s own upper-middle-class readership.
  — WSJ, 5 Oct. 2018
• Don’t believe the cries that the 5-4 decision will despoil America’s precious wetlands.
  — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 25 May 2023
• Plastics will continue to despoil the oceans even if all plastic production halts tomorrow.
  — Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 13 June 2022
• Ms Ellmann mourns ecosystems despoiled by modern humankind.
  — The Economist, 24 Oct. 2019
• In the soft pink dusk, as a perfect full moon rose out of the mountains, even the execrable post war concrete buildings below that so despoil the landscape here and throughout this ravishing island somehow managed to fade before nature’s majesty.
  — Hamish Bowles, Vogue, 11 July 2017
• Here in a primitive wilderness despoiled by European invaders, where black men and women are rounded up, murdered and hanged from trees, a much farther-reaching tragedy comes into startling focus.
  — San Diego Union-Tribune, 15 Aug. 2019
• A fortnight after the attack of Hurricane Andrew, the southern arc of Florida lies luminous and shadowless in an extraordinary wash of daylight, despoiled, naked, hammered by the sun and open to every random rain.
  — By Michael Browning, miamiherald, 25 Aug. 2015
• This remake injects some contemporary misfortune (humans despoil the water, we’re told).
  — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 24 May 2023
• Proponents of Warren’s plan might argue that this would benefit workers in the U.S., by saving jobs from unfair overseas competition by countries that abuse their workers and despoil their environments.
  — Noah Smith, Twin Cities, 16 Aug. 2019
• His Washington is a travesty of wasted humanity and squandered good intentions, of powerful actors using and despoiling the less powerful and then casting them aside like garbage.
  — Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 1 June 2017
• To anti-globalizers on the left, globalization meant a race to the bottom, corporations moving jobs to countries that exploited low-wage workers while despoiling the environment.
  — Trudy Rubin, Philly.com, 26 Jan. 2018
• The 2008 financial crisis exposed the economic folly and moral bankruptcy of a system that relied on bribing executives with stock options to squeeze workers, bamboozle customers, despoil the environment and dodge taxes.
  — Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2020
• In fact, in terms of their contribution to despoiling ground and drinking water, animal agriculture is immediately most harmful to the very rural constituencies that often elect conservative politicians.
  — Jan Dutkiewicz, The New Republic, 17 Apr. 2023
• Islanders worried that pollution would damage architecture, despoil the marine environment and deter tourists.
  — The Economist, 25 July 2019
• Farm Aid, like other companies, has rejected non-organic cotton that requires extensive use of synthetic fertilizers, soil additives, defoliants and other chemicals that despoil the land.
  — Billboard, 21 Sep. 2020

Last Updated: 24 Jul 2024