pillage

From Old French pillage, from piller ("plunder"), which traces to an unattested Late Latin sense of piliō — likely a figurative use of Latin pilō, "to remove hair," from pilus ("hair").

The facts don't support tracing further shifts in meaning beyond this: a word for stripping hair seems to have been figuratively extended to stripping a place of its goods, giving French piller and eventually English pillage.

It shares a root with pilus, the Latin word for hair, though no specific English cognate is given in the record.