Word.ws English Dictionary

ruinate

UK/ˈɹuːɪneɪt/

ruinate verb: to reduce to ruins; to destroy.

Verb

ruinate (third-person singular simple present ruinates, present participle ruinating, simple past and past participle ruinated)

  1. (archaic, transitive) To reduce to ruins; to destroy.
    • Towres, Cities, Kingdomes ye would ruinate, / In your auengement and dispiteous rage […].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • […] as in lust, [animals] covet carnal copulation at set times, men always, ruinating thereby the health of their bodies., New York Review of Books, 2001, p.51
  2. (intransitive) To fall; to tumble.

Adjective

ruinate (not comparable)

  1. Falling into ruin; decrepit.

Forms of ruinate

third-person singular presentruinates
present participleruinating
past participleruinated
pastruinated

Origin of ruinate

From the participle stem of Latin ruino.

Questions about ruinate

What does ruinate mean?
Ruinate means to reduce to ruins; to destroy.
What part of speech is ruinate?
Ruinate can be a verb or an adjective.
How do you pronounce ruinate?
Ruinate is pronounced /ˈɹuːɪneɪt/ (UK).
What is the past tense of ruinate?
The past tense of ruinate is ruinated.

Words near ruinate in the dictionary

  1. ruin value
  2. ruin'd
  3. ruin-restoration creationism
  4. ruina montium
  5. ruinable
  6. ruinate
  7. ruinated
  8. ruinates
  9. ruinating
  10. ruination
  11. ruinations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ruinate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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