mass grave

noun

plural mass graves

: a single grave containing the remains of a large number of people or animals

… a mass grave containing the skeletal remains of what are believed to be warriors from the 1st-century Roman Empire.

—Phillip Jenne

… mass graves of civilians executed by soldiers have been found on the city's outskirts.

—Paul Raffaele

The cave is one of the world's most important fossil sites and is essentially a mass grave—researchers have found thousands of teeth and pieces of bones at that bottom of a vertical 50-foot shaft.

—Jelena Maric

Examples of mass grave in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Stalin quickly executed unreliable cadres, and Pol Pot sent them to mass graves. — Andrew Mertha, Foreign Affairs, 17 Sep. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

1895, in the meaning defined above