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homicidal

adjectiveB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,890 of 15,258leans spoken

Homicidal means driven by an urge to murder people. A homicidal rage, homicidal tendencies, a homicidal maniac.

The phrase homicidal maniac belongs to fiction and to headlines rather than to medicine, and it does real harm: people with mental illness are far likelier to be attacked than to be homicidal. Homicide is the neutral legal word for a killing.

Definitions of homicidal

  1. 1adjectivehomicidalDriven by an urge to murder people.B2+

    “The film's villain is a homicidal doctor who secretly poisons his patients.”

homicidal is a state.

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    homicīda — man-slayer

  2. Old French

    homicide

  3. English

    homicide

  4. English, today

    homicidal

Built from

  • homicīdium · Latin — manslaughter

From homicide + -al. homicide comes from Old French homicide, from Latin homicīda (“man-slayer”) and homicīdium (“manslaughter”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

homicidal in the wild

  • Leuchter cited the absence of Prussian blue in the homicidal gas chambers to support his view that they could not have been used to gas people.

    Leuchter report

  • In fact, surveys have shown that the majority of people have had homicidal fantasies at some stage in their life.

    Homicidal ideation

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.

Related words

the homicide family

homicide

homicidal — used about once every 1,633 pages · #5,890 · point at the bar for the others