Idiom
wrack and ruin
Meaning
Complete destruction.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“The old house is falling into wrack and ruin.”
“After years of neglect, the once beautiful garden has fallen into total wrack and ruin.”
“The abandoned factory stood as a haunting monument to the city's industrial past, slowly surrendering its structure to the inevitable forces of wrack and ruin.”
Examples
simple
“The old house is falling into wrack and ruin.”
contextual
“After years of neglect, the once beautiful garden has fallen into total wrack and ruin.”
complex
“The abandoned factory stood as a haunting monument to the city's industrial past, slowly surrendering its structure to the inevitable forces of wrack and ruin.”
Origin
The expression appears in 1577 as *wracke and ruine*, having been influenced by the earlier variant *go to wrecke* recorded in 1548. The pairing preserves the alliterative weight of the 16th-century phrasing, maintaining the archaic *wrack* alongside the standard term for decay.
Key words
Related idioms
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