spoils

1. 1
   nounplural

   Goods, money, or property seized by force from a defeated enemy; plunder or booty.

   The victorious army carried off the spoils of the conquered province.

   The pirates quarreled bitterly over how to split the spoils.

   Similarbooty, loot, plunder, haul, pickings

   Note

   A word that lives only in the plural: you share out the spoils, never a spoil, and the verb agrees in the plural. Its reach is wider than war. Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) gives the breezes 'balmy spoils' stolen from flowers, and David Walliams's Bad Dad (2017) hands spoils to two henchmen as their cut of cash. What stays constant is the taking and the share, not the battlefield.

2. 2
   verb

   Third person singular simple present of spoil.

   Leaving milk out of the refrigerator spoils it within hours.

   A single careless remark spoils the mood at dinner.

   Note

   The present-tense verb shares its spelling with the plural noun for plunder, and the two meet in meaning. The verb's oldest uses, to strip a defeated enemy or to plunder a city, are now archaic. Everyday spoils means ruins or pampers: milk spoils, a remark spoils the mood, indulgence spoils a child. 'He spoils the city' reads as history; 'she spoils the child' reads as today.

3. 3
   nounplural

   Public offices and their benefits treated as the rightful property of a winning party or faction, to be handed out for its own advantage.

   When the party swept into power, loyal donors expected their share of the spoils.

   Reformers fought to end the practice of distributing government posts as spoils.

   Similarpatronage, pickings, rewards, plums

   Note

   Politics borrowed this from the battlefield, and the proverb that carries it says so: 'to the victor belong the spoils.' It casts an election as a conquest and public posts as loot to be divided among the winners. The word is seldom neutral in this use. To call appointments spoils is to suggest they went to loyal supporters for the party's advantage rather than on merit.

4. 4
   nounplural

   Waste material such as rock and earth left over from excavation, construction, mining, or dredging.

   The excavated spoils were piled into a great mound at the edge of the quarry.

   Crews loaded the dredging spoils onto barges for disposal offshore.

   Similardebris, rubble, waste

   Note

   Here the word turns from what is taken to what is thrown away: the rock and earth an operation leaves behind. It usually follows the name of the work that produced it, as in dredging spoils or excavation spoils, and like the plunder meaning it stays plural. Context keeps the two apart, since nobody fights over a heap of mine waste.

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