husbandicide

English

Etymology

From husband +‎ -i- +‎ -cide.

Noun

husbandicide (uncountable)

  1. (nonce word) The killing of one's husband.
    Synonyms: mariticide, viricide
    • 1889 September 21, The Saturday Evening Post‎[1], volume 69, number 11, Philadelphia, PA, page 11:
      The crime of husbandicide—the word is as permissible as infanticide—is as old as the discovery, made a very long time ago, that marriage is a failure.
    • 1892 April 9, “Professional Husband Killers.”, in Victoria Daily Times‎[2], Victoria, B.C., page 12:
      From the time of the Empress Agrippina the world has progressed in many things, but the art of husbandicide, in which the amiable spouse of Claudius was already so proficient, has remained practically stationary.
    • [1923 September 7, Madison Capital Times‎[3], volume 12, number 67, Madison, WI, page 16:
      Arsenic in the soup is fast supplanting firearms as a husbandicide among the more dashing members of the younger set.
      Used in the sense of a substance that kills a husband.]
    • 1959, Nina Farewell, Someone to Love‎[4], Panther Books, published 1961, page 71:
      "They're from my dear husband. I thought he'd forgotten to order them, and I was quietly plotting husbandicide."
    • 2005, Anne Kingston, The Meaning of Wife‎[5], New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, →ISBN, page 196:
      The murdering wife became the heroine of yet another twisted variation on the fairy tale, one that came to include husbandicide as an acceptable female fantasy.

Translations

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