Other forms: demolished, demolishing, demolishes
To demolish a building is to bring it down completely - not damage it, flatten it. The digger with a claw on the front, the terrace gone by teatime, the cooling tower dropping straight into its own dust.
The object is a structure: a house, a wall, a stand at a football ground. The figurative uses are all about total defeat - you demolish an argument by taking it apart until nothing is left standing, and a team demolishes its opponents six-nil. There is a cheerful informal use with food, where to demolish a pizza is to eat every slice, fast. The noun is demolition, which names the trade and the machinery as well as the act. And since a demolished building is gone, half-demolished is the only honest way to describe one that is still partly standing.
1verbdemolishTo knock a building down completely.~94%
“They demolished the old swimming baths and left the site empty for years.”
2verbdestroyTo destroy an argument or theory by showing it is wrong.~2%
“One question from the back of the room demolished the whole proposal.”
3verbdefeatTo defeat someone very heavily.~2%
“The visitors were demolished five-nil before half the crowd had sat down.”
4verbeatTo eat something quickly and completely.~2%
“The kids demolished the whole pizza in five minutes.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 27 sentences found in the wild and placed 26 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Demolish arrived in the sixteenth century from French demolir, to destroy or tear down, and behind that Latin demolior, with the same meaning. It replaced the Old English verb for the job, toweorpan, which disappeared completely - the Latin word knocked the native one down.
Latin
dēmōlior — to tear down
English, today
demolish
Built from
Attested since the 16th century; from Middle French - demoliss-, the stem of some conjugated forms of the verb demolir (“to destroy”, “to tear down”), from Latin dēmōlior (“to tear down”). Displaced native tōweorpan.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA