All 3 Uses of
ruinous
in
1984, by Orwell
- 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
- But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.†
p. 77.6 *
- 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
Definition:
catastrophic or extremely harmful; or badly damaged or decayed (like ancient ruins)