assassination
Americannoun
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the premeditated act of killing someone suddenly or secretively, especially a prominent person.
The meticulous way in which the journalist's assassination was carried out has led to suspicions that his killers were professionals working for state security.
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the act of destroying or harming treacherously and viciously.
They went after me with everything they had, engaging in character assassination and in destroying my reputation—a complete fabrication and frame-up.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of assassination
Explanation
An assassination is the murder of a public figure. Assassinations are usually politically motivated. If someone kills your dog, that’s not an assassination, that’s just murder (unless your dog was running for mayor). A murder is the unjust, illegal killing of someone. An assassination is a type of murder in which the victim is someone well known, usually in the world of politics. The killings of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinations: their purpose was to destabilize the government and hurt the civil rights movement, respectively. As assassination is murder plus politics.
Vocabulary lists containing assassination
American History I
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March Vocabulary Words
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World War I
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Wood's adaptation of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher has just opened at the Liverpool Everyman theatre.
From BBC • May 8, 2026
Assassination attempts can also warp how journalists cover a president’s opposition, and subdue how that opposition behaves.
From Slate • Apr. 26, 2026
In a posting titled, “Why Ford’s Theatre Doesn’t Stage Assassination Re-enactments,” the historian David McKenzie, who worked at the theater for nine years, wrote in 2021:
From New York Times • Apr. 14, 2024
Through “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” Murphy attempted to critique the homophobia that drove the narrative surrounding the case in the same way he and his team used the O.J.
From Salon • Sep. 30, 2022
It may indeed be confidently affirmed that, if the Houses had foreseen the Assassination Plot, they would have fixed, not an earlier, but a later day for the commencement of the new system.
From The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 4 by Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
