this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Decimation was a practice of group punishment in Roman times, where if a group of 100 soldiers deserted, you might punish them by forcing them to kill 1 in 10 of their rank. 1 in 10 would be beaten to death by the other 9. Nowadays, we use decimate to mean a significant loss in general, but the root Latin "decimatio" literally meant "removal of a tenth".