Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.
Linguistics just doesn’t deal with definitions like that. It does mean that, and certainly even connotatively historically. Today, in modern parlance, it definitely means “to kill a large portion of” something, and is almost never used as a 10% reference. So your team could be correctly described as “decimated” in both scenarios.
Dictionaries are free to note whatever definition they want, but so is everyone else