lay waste

Verb

lay waste (third-person singular simple present lays waste, present participle laying waste, simple past and past participle laid waste)

1. (transitive) To completely destroy, especially of a geographical area or region.
   • When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter III, in Great Expectations […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 43
   • Thirsting for revenge, his troops stormed the fortress of Kazan on the upper Volga in 1553, slaughtering the defenders just as the Mongols had done when they laid waste Russia's great cities.1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, page 16

   Synonyms:

   devastate, ravage, destroy, annihilate, aerosolize, atomize, benothing, bewreck, blot out, blotto