3 uses
(click/touch triangles for details)
Definition
catastrophic or extremely harmful; or badly damaged or decayed (like ancient ruins)
- But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.p. 77.7
- He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.p. 74.4
- That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.p. 128.2
There are no more uses of "ruinous" in 1984 by Orwell.
Typical Usage
(best examples)