Origin and history of despoliation

c. 1300, spoilen, "strip (someone) violently of clothes, strip a slain enemy," from Anglo-French espoiller, Old French espoillier, espillier "strip, plunder, pillage" and directly from Latin spoliare "strip, uncover, lay bare; strip of clothing, rob, plunder, pillage," a verb from spolia, plural of spolium "arms taken from an enemy, booty;" originally "hide, skin stripped from a killed animal," from Proto-Italic *spolio- "skin, hide" (from PIE *spol-yo-, probably from a root *spel- (1) "to split, to break off;" see spill (v.)) on the notion of "what is split off." Compare despoil.

It is attested from late 14c. in English as "strip with violence, rob, pillage, plunder (a place), dispossess; impoverish with excessive taxation." It was used c. 1400 as the verb to describe Christ's harrowing of Hell.

It is recorded by late 14c. as "divest or deprive (someone or something) of an essential quality." The sense of "destroy, ruin, damage so as to render useless" is from 1560s; that of "to over-indulge" (a child, etc.) is from 1640s (implied in the past-participle adjective spoiled). The intransitive sense of "become tainted or unsavory, go bad, lose freshness" is from 1690s. Spile represents a 19c. dialectal pronunciation. Slang spoiling for (a fight, etc.), "pining for, longing for" is from 1865, American English, from notion that one will "spoil" if he doesn't get it.

active word-forming element in English and in many verbs inherited from French and Latin, from Latin de "down, down from, from, off; concerning" (see de), also used as a prefix in Latin, usually meaning "down, off, away, from among, down from," but also "down to the bottom, totally" hence "completely" (intensive or completive), which is its sense in many English words.

As a Latin prefix it also had the function of undoing or reversing a verb's action, and hence it came to be used as a pure privative — "not, do the opposite of, undo" — which is its primary function as a living prefix in English, as in defrost (1895), defuse (1943), de-escalate (1964), etc. In some cases, a reduced form of dis-.