DESTROYER

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does destroyer mean? 

• DESTROYER (noun)
  The noun DESTROYER has 2 senses:

1. a small fast lightly armored but heavily armed warship

2. a person who destroys or ruins or lays waste to

  Familiarity information: DESTROYER used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DESTROYER (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A small fast lightly armored but heavily armed warship

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

destroyer; guided missile destroyer

Hypernyms ("destroyer" is a kind of...):

combat ship; war vessel; warship (a government ship that is available for waging war)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "destroyer"):

tin can (informal term for a destroyer)

torpedo-boat destroyer (small destroyer that was the forerunner of modern destroyers; designed to destroy torpedo boats)

Instance hyponyms:

USS Cole (a United States destroyer)

Derivation:

destroy (destroy completely; damage irreparably)

destroy (do away with, cause the destruction or undoing of)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A person who destroys or ruins or lays waste to

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

destroyer; ruiner; undoer; uprooter; waster

Context example:

uprooters of gravestones

Hypernyms ("destroyer" is a kind of...):

bad person (a person who does harm to others)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "destroyer"):

annihilator (a total destroyer)

iconoclast; image breaker (a destroyer of images used in religious worship)

diversionist; saboteur; wrecker (someone who commits sabotage or deliberately causes wrecks)

vandal (someone who willfully destroys or defaces property)

Derivation:

destroy (destroy completely; damage irreparably)

destroy (do away with, cause the destruction or undoing of)

 Context examples 

I shut my eyes involuntarily and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I replied, “I, Miss Mills! I have done it! Behold the destroyer!”—or words to that effect—and hid my face from the light, in the sofa cushion.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I chiefly fed mine eyes with beholding the destroyers of tyrants and usurpers, and the restorers of liberty to oppressed and injured nations.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

By that her eye was instantly caught and long retained; and the perusal of the highly strained epitaph, in which every virtue was ascribed to her by the inconsolable husband, who must have been in some way or other her destroyer, affected her even to tears.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Soldiers, butchers, destroyers!

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

One of whom, having never before understood that Thornton was so soon and so completely to be his home, was pondering with downcast eyes on what it would be not to see Edmund every day; and the other, startled from the agreeable fancies she had been previously indulging on the strength of her brother's description, no longer able, in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune, was considering Sir Thomas, with decided ill-will, as the destroyer of all this, and suffering the more from that involuntary forbearance which his character and manner commanded, and from not daring to relieve herself by a single attempt at throwing ridicule on his cause.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

Wild adventurers they were, forayers and destroyers from the far lands beyond the Sea of Bering, who blasted the new and unknown world with fire and sword and clutched greedily for its wealth of fur and hide.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

Even as she spoke I drew near to her, as if in terror, lest at that very moment the destroyer had been near to rob me of her.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)