Genocider

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who commits the deliberate and systematic killing of a large group of people, typically distinguished by ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political affiliation
2. An individual engaged in the intentional and organized extermination of a substantial population, often defined by specific cultural, ethnic, national, or ideological characteristics
3. Someone who systematically orchestrates the mass murder of a significant group of individuals based on their race, religion, ethnic background, or political views

Etymology: The word is a modern coinage built from "genocide" and the English agent suffix "-er," so its history is really the history of "genocide." That term was made in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who combined the Greek "génos," meaning "race" or "people," with the Latin "-cide," from "caedere," "to kill." Lemkin's aim was to name a crime that had no word of its own, and the term soon entered international law and the English language. "Genocider" followed by adding the English "-er," which attaches to a noun to denote a person who performs an action. It is a piecewise doublet of "genocidaire," a French-derived term for the same kind of perpetrator, so the two words share a meaning but reached English by different routes. The English form is the more transparent of the two, since its parts can be read directly off the page.

Synonyms: mass murderer, butcher