Murder is the crime of deliberately and unlawfully killing another person. As a verb, it means to commit such a killing.
From Old English *mordor* or *morthor* “secret killing, slaughter,” related to German *Mord* and Dutch *moord*. The word has long carried a sense of intentional, wrongful killing.
English has many words for killing, but “murder” is reserved for the deliberate, illegal kind. The same root shows up in “a murder of crows,” possibly because a large group of black birds suggested death and bad omens. Language quietly encodes how seriously a culture treats different kinds of violence.
Discussions of 'murder' intersect with long histories of gendered violence, including femicide and intimate partner homicide, which were often minimized or framed as private 'domestic disputes.' Legal language historically treated violence against women as less serious than violence against men.
Be precise about patterns of gendered violence (e.g., 'women are disproportionately victims of intimate partner murder') without implying that any gender is inherently violent.
Women activists, lawyers, and researchers have been crucial in naming and documenting femicide and pushing legal systems to treat murder in domestic contexts as serious crimes.
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