wreak
/riːk
/- According to Mary Bryan, the society's chief executive officer, even seemingly small mistakes can wreak huge amounts of damage.
- The adverse weather has wreaked havoc with many of the non-national routes and damage has run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
- The Category 5 storm wreaked havoc, doing more than $20 billion in damage and making it by far the costliest hurricane ever in United States history.
Synonyms
- And so, whatever happens, let's hope we're not going to have an administration that is set up to somehow wreak vengeance on the other side.
- On such an account, Oakes finds he is not as generously treated in the book as he might like, and consequently wreaks some vengeance.
- Thus begins an adventure in which Measle finds friends, braves dangers, wreaks vengeance and discovers a happy ending.
- Harenc wreaked him with a vengeance.
Usage
In the phrase wrought havoc, as in they wrought havoc on the countryside, wrought is an archaic past tense of work and is not, as is sometimes assumed, a past tense of wreak.
Derivatives
wreaker
- The case of Bouzaglo, for example, offers a chance to examine the model of the wreaker of virtual mayhem.
- There's more than a trace of Margo in Jules, the lying, desperate marriage wreaker of My Best Friend's Wedding.
- I guess there's something radical about wreaking havoc in a factory - but who can watch this film and not root for the wreaker?
Origin
Old English wrecan 'drive (out), avenge', of Germanic origin; related to Dutch wreken and German rächen; compare with wrack4, wreck, and wretch.
wreck from Middle English:
When it first appeared wreck meant ‘cargo or wreckage washed ashore from a wrecked or stranded vessel’. The word came into English from Old French wrec. The source was an Old Norse word meaning ‘to drive’ that was related to wreak, ‘to cause a lot of damage or harm’, and to rack. A person in a state of stress or emotional exhaustion has been a wreck since the 1790s and a nervous wreck since about 1870. Wretch (Old English) and wretched (Middle English) are related to wreak.