Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Genocide
/ˈdʒɛnəsaɪd/noun
The deliberate destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The Greek roots
γένος
génos
race, kin, stock
Literally: “killing of a people”
Follow a root:γένος9 words
The story of the word
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who lost most of his family in the Nazi killings, built the word in 1944 for his study of Axis rule in occupied Europe. He joined the Greek γένος to the Latin ending -cidium, killing, and defended the hybrid on the ground that the crime needed a name before any court could try it. The United Nations convention adopted the term in 1948, four years after it existed at all.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek + Latin → modern coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1944
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
genusgeneticeugenicsgenealogy
In a sentence
The tribunal spent two years establishing intent, the hardest element of genocide to prove.
Lemkin lobbied delegates one by one until the convention passed.