lay waste

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lay waste (third-person singular simple present lays waste, present participle laying waste, simple past and past participle laid waste)

1. (transitive) To completely destroy, especially of a geographical area or region.

   Synonyms: devastate, ravage; see also Thesaurus:destroy

   • 1860 December – 1861 August, Charles Dickens, chapter III, in Great Expectations […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published October 1861, →OCLC, page 43:

     When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since looked upon the light of day.

   • 1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, page 16:

     Thirsting for revenge, his troops stormed the fortress of Kazan on the upper Volga in 1553, slaughtering the defenders just as the Mongols had done when they laid waste Russia's great cities.

   • 2017 January 12, Jesse Hassenger, “A literal monster truck is far from the stupidest thing about Monster Trucks”, in The Onion AV Club‎^[1]:

     In addition to racking up what looks like a substantial offscreen body count, the movie at one point offers an eight-second introduction for a sleazy used-car salesman character for the sole purpose of justifying Tripp and Creech laying waste to his inventory.

Sometimes takes "to" instead of being simply transitive. Thus, "...they laid waste to Russia's great cities" would be an acceptable alternative to the citation above.

lay waste

1. simple past of lie waste