Cwealm

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic term for a violent death or killing, often by murder ; a deadly epidemic disease or plague that spreads among a population
2. Old English word for slaughter or a violent killing ; a pestilence, meaning a devastating contagious sickness that sweeps through people
3. A killing carried out by violence, especially murder ; a fatal pestilence or plague that kills many people in a community

Etymology: Cwealm is an Old English word meaning "violent death" or "murder," and it is one of the few Old English words that has survived into modern English almost entirely through poetry and scholarship rather than everyday speech. It descends from the Proto-Germanic root behind the verb "to kill" (Old English "cwellan," which is also the source of "quell" in its older sense of "to kill" or "to subdue"). The noun was in regular use in Anglo-Saxon times, appearing in texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the poetry of Beowulf-era manuscripts, and it kept its sharp, violent sense throughout. The word died out as a common term after the Middle English period, when the Norman-influenced vocabulary of "murder" and "homicide" took over. It was revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by antiquarians and by writers of archaic or historical fiction, who wanted a term with the grim weight of the old language. Its survival in dictionaries owes much to that revival rather than to unbroken use.