The phrase "almost decimated" is commonly used in English, but it is technically incorrect because "decimate" means to destroy a large portion of something, typically one-tenth.
You can use it when describing a situation where something has been significantly reduced or harmed, but not completely destroyed.
Example: "The storm almost decimated the town, leaving only a few buildings standing."
Alternatives: "nearly destroyed" or "almost annihilated."
"It helps that they have the same skin color," she writes of Anna's parents' origins, "a rich butterscotch brown that tells the tale of the island's history, the peaceful Arawaks almost decimated by the war-loving Carib Indians who in turn were almost decimated by smallpox and other diseases the Spanish conquistadors brought with them".
After first east coast European contact in 1770 and invasion on 26 January, 1788, Indigenous Australians were almost decimated by massacres and widespread poisoning, imprisonment, the forced removal of children and programs of assimilation and racial "dilution".
The sparse remnants of Hasidic sects in Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union were almost decimated by Hitler's slaughter of the European Jews and arrived in New York after World War II in tiny numbers, barely enough to fill a sect's single small yeshiva or room-size synagogue.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mechanical watch industry was almost decimated thanks to the arrival of cheap, highly accurate electronic quartz watches.
Animals like lions, leopards and rhino have been almost decimated.
Similarly, Yellow Leaf Hammocks provides support and sustainability to a Hill Tribe in Thailand that was almost decimated by deforestation and disease by selling hand-woven hammocks.
Conquistadors plundered the Sierra Nevada for gold, extinguishing other tribes in the area and almost decimating the Arhuac.
At the news conference, Mr. Wardak spoke of the growth of the army, which after the collapse of the Communist government here was almost completely decimated.
The crinoids had begun to decline long before the end of the Permian, by which time they were almost entirely decimated, with both the flexible and camerate varieties dying out.
One of the main buildings in Tilted Towers, lovingly called 'Split' by many players, was almost entirely decimated.
This group was almost entirely decimated during the smallpox epidemic, those who were left were re-located.
