desolating

adj

1. Causing anguish and despair.

   “So when Mary's whole nature rose to meet this word of Jesus, and threw itself into the consent she gave, and turned her forcibly as it weer from Jesus to John, it was as if the whole anguish of the Crucifixion gained a new life, a fresh activity, a more potent bitterness, a more desolating power.”

   “Roger's Death was a more intimate and a more desolating event than the death of Lytton.”

2. Destructive; ruinous.

   “Why, that it was the cause of Pure Democracy which we were thus called on to support; of universal suffrage, Jacobin clubs, and a furious press; of revolutionary confiscation, democratic anarchy, and unbridled injustice; of the most desolating of tyrannies, the most ruinous of despotisms.”

   “In the reign of Henry VI. commenced one of the most desolating of wars — the War of the Roses.”

   “It prospered from its first opening until another war, more desolating than that of the Revolution, called away its students, diminished its property, and impoverished its patrons.”

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of desolate