Other forms: damaged, damages, damaging
To damage something is to harm it so it no longer works or looks right. Damage the roof, storm damage, the box was damaged in transit.
The noun is uncountable — a lot of damage, extensive damage — and never a damage. The countable plural damages is a legal term meaning money paid in compensation, which is a completely different thing: he was awarded damages. That trap catches almost everybody. Note damaging as an adjective, meaning harmful to a reputation or a case, and the fixed phrase brain damage. Damage limitation is the standard term for trying to reduce the harm after something has gone wrong.
1verbdamageTo harm something so it works or looks worse.
“The frost damaged everything in the greenhouse.”
2noundoneHarm done to something.
“There was surprisingly little damage.”
3nounlawIn law, money paid as compensation.
“The court awarded damages of forty thousand.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
damage is harm done.
Also accepted in games: harm
Latin damnum meant loss or harm — the same root as condemn and damn, which is to declare a loss. Damage is what the loss consists of, and the legal sense of damages, meaning payment for it, is the oldest use in English.
Proto-Indo-European
*deh₂p-
Latin
damnum
Vulgar Latin
*damnāticum
Old French
damage
Middle English
damage
English, today
damage
From Middle English damage, from Old French damage, from Vulgar Latin damnāticum from Classical Latin damnum. Compare modern French dommage. Largely displaced native Middle English scath (whence unscathed). Cognate with Spanish daño, Portuguese dano, Italian danno, French dam, Romanian daună.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA