Other forms: victims
A victim is the person something bad was done to — robbed, hurt, cheated, killed. The victim of a burglary comes home to a broken window and a gap on the shelf where the laptop was.
You are the victim OF a crime, a fire, a scam, an earthquake, and you fall victim TO something. Victims are made by people and by disasters alike, so a flood has victims and so does a fraud. The verb victimise means to single someone out for unfair treatment; victimhood is the state of being a victim, and this is where the word turns sour, because to play the victim is to claim a harm you have not suffered. In a courtroom the victim is not the plaintiff and not the witness, and English keeps the three apart. Older and religious writing uses victim for a creature killed as an offering, which is the original sense.
1nounvictimA person harmed, robbed, or killed by a crime, an accident, or a disaster.~98%
“The victim of the burglary came home to a broken window.”
2nounanimalA person or animal killed as an offering to a god.~2%
“In the older translation the lamb is called the victim.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
victim is a person.
Victim came through Middle French victime from Latin victima, the word for a sacrificial animal — the beast led to the altar. English kept the word and dropped the altar, so a victim is now anyone something was done to. It looks like victor, and it is not related: the two go back to separate roots that happen to sound alike.
Proto-Indo-European
*weyk-
Latin
victima
Middle French
victime
English, today
victim
Borrowed from Middle French victime, from Latin victima. From Middle French victime, from Latin victima (“sacrificial animal”). Although this root and victor drive from homophonous PIE roots, they are traditionally reconstructed as separate words and thus not cognates.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA