Parricide

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈpæ.ɹɪ.saɪd/

Definitions

  1. The act of killing one's own parent or parents
  2. the unlawful act of murdering one's mother or father | someone who commits the crime of killing their own parent or parents
  3. a person guilty of matricide or patricide, or the criminal act itself of deliberately ending a parent's life

Etymology: Parricide is a compound term built from Latin roots that entered English in the 16th century to name a crime of particular gravity—the murder of one's parent. The word combines "parr-", derived from the Latin "parens" (meaning "parent"), with the suffix "-cide", from the Latin "caedere" (meaning "to kill" or "to cut down"). This "-cide" element appears in many English words denoting killing: homicide, suicide, genocide, and so forth. The Romans themselves used "parricidium" for this crime, though their term originally referred more broadly to the murder of a close relative or even a citizen, before it narrowed to specifically mean patricide or matricide. The Latin "parens" descends from the Proto-Indo-European root ""per-", relating to production or procreation, the same root that gave rise to English "parent" itself. The verb "caedere" is equally ancient, tracing back to Proto-Indo-European ""kayd-", meaning to strike or hew. English borrowed the "-cide" suffix wholesale from Latin during the medieval and early modern periods, initially through French intermediaries in some cases, though direct Latin scientific and legal borrowing became increasingly common as English intellectual and legal vocabulary expanded. When parricide first appeared in English texts around the 1500s, it was primarily a legal and theological term, used in formal discourse about crime and morality. The word carried enormous weight in Christian thought, since the commandment to honor one's father and mother was foundational to moral law, making the violation of that duty—especially through murder—almost unthinkably grave. Over time, as English vocabulary matured and became more precise, parricide remained in use alongside related terms like "patricide" (murder of one's father) and "matricide" (murder of one's mother), which offer greater specificity. Today the word functions primarily in legal, historical, and literary contexts, though it is less common in everyday speech than its more general synonyms.