homicide
Americannoun
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homicides
plural
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the killing of one human being by another.
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a person who kills another; murderer.
noun
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the killing of a human being by another person
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a person who kills another
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of homicide
First recorded in 1325–75; Middle English, from Middle French, from Latin homicīdium “a killing,” homicīda “killer,” equivalent to homi- (combining form of homō “man”) + -cīdium, -cīda, noun suffix; see -cide
Explanation
The noun homicide means a murder. If you kill another person, you are committing a homicide. The level of the homicide is legally defined as murder if the act was intentional and as manslaughter if it was unintentional. Remember the meaning of homicide by remembering that cide, from the Latin cida, refers to killing, while the Latin homo means "man.” So homicide means “killing a man.” You can see another example in this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide — that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life — are alike forbidden.”
Vocabulary lists containing homicide
Tears of a Tiger
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Latin Love, Vol II: cadere
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And Then There Were None
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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.
See Examples For:
But the safeguards "do not diminish the seriousness of an AI system presenting fabricated information as though it came from a person with knowledge of a homicide," the police statement said.
From BBC ● Oct. 10, 2026
Police in Philadelphia say Anthropic alerted it this week that one of its artificial-intelligence models submitted a false homicide tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026
Births paid for by Medicaid and unmarried status were associated with a greater risk of homicide.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 8, 2026
She’s spent seven years in the gang homicide division.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2026
Matthew caught Hugo easily and put a hand to the back of his baby brother’s head while fastening his eyes on the two homicide detectives.
From "Confessions of a Murder Suspect" by James Patterson
Members of the public should continue to submit legitimate information about unsolved homicides through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com,” the police said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026
The team went 0-10 in 2025 and is 1-2 this season under first-year coach Patrick Goodpaster, a lieutentant in the Gardena police department in charge of homicides.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 10, 2026
The number of homicides in the country of 34 million has risen markedly since 2018, while international drug trafficking networks continue to operate on its territory.
From Barron's ● Sep. 10, 2026
The officers failed to class Carmenza's death as a murder and did not pass it to a homicide team for a fuller investigation, as happens with suspected homicides.
From BBC ● Aug. 7, 2026
So even in a death penalty advocate’s best-case scenario, capital punishment could explain only one twenty-fifth of the drop in homicides in the 1990s.
From "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" by Steven D. Levitt
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.
