The word "pestilence" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a plague or epidemic that has caused a lot of destruction. For example, "The pestilence swept through the country, causing widespread destruction and despair."
So, that was the year that was: storm, death, war, pestilence and some excellent baking.
One of them is Eyam Hall in the "Plague Village" where in 1665 the villagers decided to stay and die, one by one, rather than spread the pestilence throughout the county.
At about 450 years old, the Old Vine has survived war, fire and pestilence, and still produces fat bunches of red Žametovka grapes (most vines slow down at the tender age of 40).
It culminated in the Economist dedicating a notorious cover in 2000 to what it described as "the hopeless continent", claiming that across Africa "floods, famine… government-sponsored thuggery, and poverty and pestilence continue unabated".
The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation...but should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemic, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands.
An island-full of identical individuals could be wiped out by an infection, just as entire crops of genetically identical plants may succumb to plague and pestilence.
And yet all are prospering.True, it is more difficult to operate in hot climates than in temperate ones, and disease and pestilence do nothing for labour productivity, but these are hardly spellbinding insights.
They advance against that standard, rather than the pestilence, beggary and injustice of serfdom.
Some combination of war, weather, misrule or pestilence is usually to blame.
However, as the parents of any small child know, it is the young who bring pestilence into the home.
Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe.
