湖边社【每日一词】ransack - vt. 洗劫，掠夺；遍寻
Definition: transitive verb
1: to look through thoroughly in often a rough way
… he and 15 staff members watched agents ransack the office.
—Christian Caryl et al.
In desperation, I ransacked my refrigerator for something else to whip up.
—Dana Bowen
(figurative) Most novelists ransack their lives for that first novel; it might be called involuntary reporting.
—Tom Wolfe
2: to search through and steal from in a forceful and damaging way : PLUNDER
Thieves ransacked the house.
Louis XVI was persuaded to risk a navy far from its own shores and to ransack the French arsenals for arms and ammunition …
—C. P. Reynolds
ransacker noun
Did you know?
Ransack carries the image of a house being roughly disarranged, as might happen when you are frantically searching for something. This is appropriate given the word’s origin. Ransack comes, via Middle English, from the Old Norse word rannsaka: the rann in rannsaka means “house”; the second half of rannsaka is what is known as an “ablaut” variant of sœkja, meaning “to seek, search out.” But our modern use of the word isn’t restricted to houses. You can ransack a drawer, a suitcase, or even (by hurriedly looking through it) the contents of a book. Ransack also inspired another English word related to disorder and unsteadiness. A now-obsolete form of ransack, ransackle, gave us our adjective ramshackle, meaning “rickety” or “carelessly or loosely constructed.”
Synonyms
despoil,loot,maraud,pillage,plunder,sack
Examples of ransack in a Sentence
Robbers ransacked the apartment looking for money.
The room had been ransacked.
What wasn’t reported, as Mr. Holden recalled, was that his house and car were ransacked more than once, and that his research material about Prince Charles was stolen.
—Penelope Green, New York Times, 27 Oct. 2023
Police say that the group of looters ransacked Fairmount Pharmacy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 10:50 p.m.
—Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, Fox News, 10 Oct. 2023
The house was filthy and looked like it had been ransacked.
—Amy Dickinson, Washington Post, 8 Oct. 2023