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fratricide

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: fratricides

Fratricide is the killing of your own brother. Accused of fratricide.

The word covers the act and sometimes the person who does it. Fratricide is also used of soldiers killing their own side, which is a hard use of a hard word.

Gustave Doré · Public domain

Definitions of fratricide

  1. 1nounfratricideThe killing of your own brother.C2

    “The chronicle calls it fratricide and names no witnesses.”

fratricide is a killing.

Where it comes from

Latin frater, brother, plus caedere, to kill, on the same pattern as patricide and regicide.

  1. Latin

    frātricīdium

  2. Middle French

    fratricide

  3. English, today

    fratricide

From Middle French fratricide or its etymon Latin frātricīdium.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

fratricide in the wild

  • In military terminology, friendly fire or fratricide is an unintentional attack by allied or neutral forces on friendly troops while attempting to attack enemy or hostile targets.

    Friendly fire

  • In a military context, fratricide refers to a service member killing a comrade.

    Fratricide

  • In relation to nuclear warfare, nuclear fratricide denotes the inadvertent destruction of nuclear warheads or their delivery systems by detonations from other warheads in the same attack.

    Nuclear fratricide

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.