depopulant

Why this word is great

DEPOPULANT — [Noun] An agent or force that causes the reduction or eradication of a population. From the Latin dēpopulāns ("laying waste"). Unlike "depopulation" (the process or outcome of decline), a depopulant is the active cause—be it war's relentless machinery, a plague that hollows out cities bone by bone, or the slow, silent poison of a river turned to lead. It is not merely pestilence (which kills but does not always empty the land), nor famine (which starves but may spare the structures of life). A depopulant is the hand that unmakes the hearth, the shadow that lingers long after the bodies have fallen.