OTOH, from my OED, completely destroy (a building, town, or other site), following it with the example villages were razed to the ground, and gives the ultimate derivation as a Latin verb 'to scrape'. Remember when quoting M-W that the original W was the Anglophobe Noah Webster who, when selecting between variant spellings, always chose the spelling that wasn't the common English one! Thus inflicting abominations such as 'color' & 'center' upon the world (I don't think we can blame him for 'aluminum' - it hadn't quite been 'invented' when he published his first dikker! ;-) ). I give best to Nigel on this one!
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