Other forms: ransacked, ransacking, ransacks
To ransack is to search a place roughly, leaving it wrecked. Ransack the house, the drawers were ransacked, ransack the archive.
The wreckage is part of the meaning: to ransack is to search without caring what you break. It also means to plunder. The Old Norse behind it means to search a house, which is exactly what it still means, minus the politeness.
1verbransackTo search a place roughly, leaving it wrecked.
“Burglars ransacked the flat, emptying every drawer onto the floor.”
ransack is a searching.
Old Norse rannsaka means to search a house — rann, a house, plus saka, to seek.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁reh₁- — to rest; quiet
Proto-Germanic
*razną — dwelling, house
Old Norse
rannsaka — to search a house (especially for stolen goods)
Middle English
ransaken — to examine, investigate; to rob, plunder, steal; to search, seek; to treat roughly, mistreat
English, today
ransack
Built from
The is derived from Middle English ransaken (“to examine, investigate; to rob, plunder, steal; to search, seek; to treat roughly, mistreat”), from Old Norse rannsaka (“to search a house (especially for stolen goods)”), from rann (“house”) (from Proto-Germanic razną (“dwelling, house”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁reh₁- (“to rest; quiet”)) + saka, an variant of sœkja, sǿkja (“to look for, search, seek”) (from Proto-Germanic sōkijaną (“to look for, seek”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European seh₂g- (“to follow; to seek out, trace”)). Verb senses search to steal tr, steal as plunder, and search to steal intr are probably influenced by sack#verb (“to pillage, to plunder”). The is derived from the verb.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA