Other forms: plundered, plundering, plunders
To plunder is to rob a place violently during a war. Plunder the city, plundered the treasury, plunder and burn.
It is a war crime under the Hague and Geneva rules and has been prosecuted as one. Figuratively it means taking a great deal from something — plunder the archives. The word came into English from German during the Thirty Years War.
1verbplunderTo rob a place violently during a war.
“Invading soldiers plundered the city, stealing gold from the churches.”
plunder is a robbing.
From German plundern, to loot, brought into English during the Thirty Years War in the 1630s.
Middle Low German
plunderen
German
plündern — to loot
English, today
plunder
Recorded since 1632 during the Thirty Years War, native British use since the Cromwellian Civil War. Borrowed from German plündern (“to loot”), from Middle High German -, from Middle Low German plunderen, from a noun originally meaning "household goods, bedding, clothing," of obscure ultimate origin. This is first attested in medieval records, and according to Gijsseling, is therefore attested too late to be considered a substrate word. Due to the lack of obvious cognates in other languages from which it would have been loaned, it could have developed as some slang word in Lower Saxony/the Low Countries. Cognate with Dutch plunderen, West Frisian plonderje, stq plunnerje. Probably denominal from a word for “household goods, clothes, bedding”; compare Middle Dutch plunder, Plunder (“stuff”), Dutch - and West Frisian plunje (“clothes”). The Philippine definitions originate with the Anti-Plunder Act, an act of Congress enacted in 1991.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA