a ruin: a place laid waste, or the state of being laid waste
This is the word for a place reduced to rubble, and for the condition of being reduced to rubble. It pictures a city, a house, or a whole land that once held life and now holds only broken stone and silence. The Bible uses it most often for what war and judgment leave behind: streets without people, fields gone to weeds, ruins where flocks now graze and wild birds nest.
The word slides easily between two angles on the same picture. Sometimes it names the physical wreckage itself, the ruined heaps you could walk through, especially in the plural "the ruins" of Jerusalem that the prophets promise will one day be rebuilt. Sometimes it names the condition rather than the rubble, a land "made a desolation," emptied and abandoned. These are not two different words but two ways of looking at the same devastated scene, which is why the same form carries both.
The prophets, above all Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, lean on this word heavily. In judgment it is the threat: your proud city will become a heap of ruins. In comfort it is that threat reversed: the ancient ruins will be rebuilt, and the waste places will sing.