Countermurder

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A murder in response to another murder. countable, uncountable

    "I go out with him on tour in his armored car through Bujumbura's ethnically cleansed neighborhoods to talk to the adolescents with the Kalashnikovs and grenades, who for the price of a few beers will firebomb a street. He gets out and confronts them, telling them that the cycle of murder and countermurder must stop, or they will all be swept away."

Example

More examples

"I go out with him on tour in his armored car through Bujumbura's ethnically cleansed neighborhoods to talk to the adolescents with the Kalashnikovs and grenades, who for the price of a few beers will firebomb a street. He gets out and confronts them, telling them that the cycle of murder and countermurder must stop, or they will all be swept away."

Etymology

From counter- + murder.

More for "countermurder"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.