0 causing great harm and destruction:
1 causing permanent and severe harm:
ruinous costs
2 causing great harm or destruction:
This benefits employers unable or reluctant to lower wages in response to disruptive and sometimes ruinous price reductions and lowprice competitive entry.
Sodomites were 'devils in human shape', respectable on the outside but ruinous within.
She was forced to marry a second time; and she was forced into a ruinous match.
At least half of all opium users took it in excess with ruinous effects on their health, their morals and their finances.
The ruinous setting suggests the pleasures of tasteful disintegration and ornamental decay, the conventional objects of the eighteenth-century antiquarian imagination.
The shell subsequently disintegrated into a ruinous and dangerous state.
They were powerless to stop incidents of corruption and were unable to stop potentially ruinous material finding its way - via the trustees - into the structure.
It was occupied by a pair of industrial sheds in a ruinous state which most architects and developers would have demolished without a second thought.
