Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The killing of a king.
- noun One who kills a king.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The killing of a king.
- noun A king-killer; one who puts a king to death; specifically, in English history, a member of the high court of justice constituted by Parliament for the trial of Charles I., by which he was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death in 1649.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun One who kills or who murders a king; specifically (Eng. Hist.), one of the judges who condemned Charles I. to death.
- noun The killing or the murder of a king.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The killing of a
king . - noun One who kills a
king .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun someone who commits regicide; the killer of a king
- noun the act of killing a king
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The King had wisely left the business to Parliament, and, when the circumstances of the times, and the sincere horror in which good men held what they called regicide and sacrilege are duly considered, it must be owned that Parliament acted with humanity and moderation.
Life of John Milton Garnett, Richard, 1835-1906 1890
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King had wisely left the business to Parliament, and, when the circumstances of the times, and the sincere horror in which good men held what they called regicide and sacrilege are duly considered, it must be owned that Parliament acted with humanity and moderation.
Life of John Milton Richard Garnett 1870
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Abidan’s justification for regicide is a deliberate satire of Cromwell’s views: ‘King!
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For they say not regicide, that is, killing of a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant, is lawful.
Leviathan 2007
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The revisionist view of Cromwell as a liberator rather than a regicide was the work of Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, and a result of Carlyle's friendship with Emerson.
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The revisionist view of Cromwell as a liberator rather than a regicide was the work of Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, and a result of Carlyle's friendship with Emerson.
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Mencius refuses to classify as regicide the killing of the wicked king Zhou, on the grounds that he was not truly a king.
Xunzi Robins, Dan 2007
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The judges are called regicide, because they tried and condemned a king.
The Short-story William Patterson Atkinson
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For they say not regicide, that is, killing of a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant, is lawful.
Leviathan, or, The matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill 1651
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The death of a regicide was a sort of gala to these belles; while the lead was melting over the furnace, the iron pinchers heating in the fire, and the horses disposed for tearing asunder the four quarters of the victim of the laws, some of them amused themselves with an innocent game at cards, in sight of all these terrible preparations, from which a man of ordinary feeling would avert his looks with horror.
Paris as It Was and as It Is Francis W. Blagdon 1798
chained_bear commented on the word regicide
The Onion Historical Archives (not really) has an article about this.
October 7, 2008