a horrifying devastation: a place laid waste and abandoned, and the shudder of dread it provokes
This one Hebrew word holds together two things English usually keeps apart: the ruin itself and the horror people feel when they look at it. Its root means both to be laid waste and to be stunned into dread, so the word carries the wreckage and the reaction to it at the same time.
Most often it names a land or city stripped of people and left in rubble, the standard picture of a place under judgment. But in the prophets, and especially in Jeremiah, it slides into a second use: the ruined place becomes a public spectacle, something passersby hiss at, curse by, and shudder over. There it sits in a fixed list beside words like hissing, curse, and reproach, and means less a wasteland than an appalling example held up before everyone.
A few times the word turns fully inward and names the dread itself, the horror that grips a person or fills a cup of judgment. Whether it points at the ruin, at the shock of onlookers, or at the inner shudder, the same idea runs through all of it: something so devastated that the only fitting response is horror.