Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or an instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.
  • noun The slaughter of a large number of animals.
  • noun Informal A severe defeat, as in a sports event.
  • transitive verb To kill indiscriminately and wantonly; slaughter.
  • transitive verb Informal To defeat decisively.
  • transitive verb Informal To botch; bungle.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The indiscriminate killing of human beings; the unnecessary slaughter of a number of persons, as in barbarous warfare or persecution, or for revenge or plunder: as, the massacre of Glencoe: sometimes applied also to the wholesale killing of wild animals.
  • noun In heraldry, a pair of antlers or attires attached to a piece of the skull, used as a bearing.
  • To kill with attendant circumstances of atrocity; butcher; slaughter: commonly used in reference to the killing of a large number of human beings at once, who are not in a condition to defend themselves.
  • Synonyms Murder, Slaughter, etc. See kill.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To kill in considerable numbers where much resistance can not be made; to kill with indiscriminate violence, without necessity, and contrary to the usages of nations; to butcher; to slaughter; -- limited to the killing of human beings.
  • noun The killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the usages of civilized people.
  • noun obsolete Murder.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The intentional killing of a considerable number of human beings, under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the norms of civilized people.
  • noun obsolete Murder.
  • verb transitive To kill in considerable numbers where much resistance can not be made; to kill with indiscriminate violence, without necessity, and contrary to the norms of civilized people; to butcher; to slaughter. (Often limited to the killing of human beings.)

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb kill a large number of people indiscriminately
  • noun the savage and excessive killing of many people

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from Old French macecle, macecre, butchery, shambles.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

1580, from Middle French massacre, from Old French macacre, macecle ("slaughterhouse, butchery"), from Medieval Latin mazacrium ("massacre, slaughter, killing”, also “the head of a newly killed stag"), from Middle Low German *matskelen (“to massacre”) (compare German metzeln ("massacre")), frequentive of matsken, matzgen ("to cut, hew"), from Proto-Germanic *maitanan (“to cut”), from Proto-Indo-European *mei- (“small”). Akin to Old High German meizan ("to cut"), Dutch matsen ("to maul, kill"), dialectal German metzgern "to butcher, kill", German metzgen ("to cull, kill, slaughter cattle"), Metzger ("a butcher"), Metzelei ("massacre"), Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐌹𐍄𐌰𐌽 (maitan, "to cut"). See also the French term massacrer.

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Examples

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  • A whole bunch of land.

    January 6, 2009

  • I think my friend said, "I hear footsteps."

    I wore my black and white dress to

    The Birthday Massacre.

    -Birthday Massacre.

    July 28, 2009

  • In heraldry, a pair of antlers or attires attached to a piece of the skull, used as a bearing. -- Century Dictionary

    October 10, 2011