pillage: [14] The origins of pillage are disputed. It comes from Old French pillage, a derivative of piller ‘plunder’, but there the consensus breaks down. Some say that piller (which also meant ‘tear up’) was based on pille ‘rag, cloth’, which may have been descended from Latin pilleus ‘felt cap’; others that it came from a Vulgar Latin verb *pīliāre, a derivative of Latin pīlum ‘javelin’ (source of English pile ‘supporting stake’); and others again that it came from Latin pilāre ‘remove hair’ (source of English peel [13], which originally meant ‘plunder’), a derivative of pilus ‘hair’ (source of English pile ‘nap’), in which case it would be roughly parallel in inspiration to colloquial English fleece ‘rob’.
