to ruin: to wreck something so it no longer works as it should, whether a thing, a people, or a person's own moral character
At its core this word names the act of ruining. The same verb covers leveling a city, wasting a field, and a person rotting from the inside out, because all three are the one motion of taking something whole and breaking it past usefulness.
The range runs along a single line. At one end is plain physical destruction, where armies lay a land waste, the flood wipes out living things, and an angel strikes down a city. In the middle is spoiling, where a thing is not flattened but marred so it can no longer serve its purpose, like a damaged eye or a ruined garment. At the far end the ruin turns inward and becomes moral: a people corrupt themselves, their conduct rots, and they become the kind of thing that invites the destruction the word also names.
That last move is the heart of why one word does so much work. In the Hebrew Bible moral corruption and coming destruction are two ends of the same rope. When Genesis says the earth was corrupt and then God resolves to destroy it, the same verb carries both the crime and the sentence. The word lets a writer make that grim point: the corrupt are only ruining now what judgment will finish ruining later.
A closely related form hardens into a near title, the destroyer, naming the agent who carries ruin out, whether a raiding band, a death-dealing angel, or a tyrant bent on devastation.