Populicide
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The deliberate slaughter of a people or a nation. archaic, countable, uncountable
"In 1793, the capital vvas menaced vvith the dreadful ſcourge of famine, and if vve are to believe ſome ſpeculative men, this originated in a populicide conſpiracy, on the part of the then exiſting government."
Example
More examples"In 1793, the capital vvas menaced vvith the dreadful ſcourge of famine, and if vve are to believe ſome ſpeculative men, this originated in a populicide conſpiracy, on the part of the then exiſting government."
Etymology
Probably an unadapted borrowing from French populicide (“(noun) slaughter of a people; (adjective) harmful to the people”) (obsolete, rare), from Latin populus (“community; people; nation”) + French -cide (suffix meaning ‘killing’). The French word populicides was coined by the French journalist and revolutionary François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) in 1795 to describe the massacre of 117,000 farmers in the Vendée region during the French Revolution. Equivalent to populace + -icide.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.