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
  • And on both flanks, the Trust set aside 33 low-lying acres that still contain the potential to despoil the whole place.
    — Developing Governors Island, Curbed, 11 May 2023
  • The culprits despoiled art and defaced American icons under cover of night.
    — Stu Bykofsky, Philly.com, 30 Aug. 2017
  • Plastics will continue to despoil the oceans even if all plastic production halts tomorrow.
    — Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 13 June 2022
  • 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
  • Don’t believe the cries that the 5-4 decision will despoil America’s precious wetlands.
    — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 25 May 2023
  • This remake injects some contemporary misfortune (humans despoil the water, we’re told).
    — Wesley Morris, New York Times, 24 May 2023
  • Growth in Africa must be clean, both in terms of generating energy and not despoiling the continent’s landscape and natural resources.
    — Jack A. Goldstone, Foreign Affairs, 18 May 2023
  • 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.
    — Los Angeles Times, 1 Aug. 2019
  • 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
  • Islanders worried that pollution would damage architecture, despoil the marine environment and deter tourists.
    — The Economist, 25 July 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
  • 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 world is a stakeholder, not a bystander, and cannot remain silent as Brazil despoils this indispensable carbon sink, irreplaceable oxygen source, and precious repository of plant and animal life.
    — Stewart Patrick, Foreign Affairs, 19 Oct. 2021
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Meanwhile, human activity has imperiled biodiversity as people despoil lands and waters, introduce invasive species, and harvest natural resources unsustainably.
    — Stewart Patrick, Foreign Affairs, 19 Oct. 2021
  • In the 21st century, oil extraction has become a serious threat to Ecuadoran Amazonia, with large swaths of forest, often located in Indigenous territories, despoiled by the release of wastewater from the wells.
    — Stanley Stewart, Travel + Leisure, 10 Jan. 2026
  • One looks to the story of the Haitian World Cup team, appearing in the tournament for the first time in fifty years, which has gathered expatriate players from the Haitian diaspora to play for that beautiful and utterly despoiled country, where many of them have never lived.
    — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 21 June 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'despoil.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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