massacre

noun

mas·sa·cre | \ ˈma-si-kər

Definition of massacre

(Entry 1 of 2)

1 : the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty witnessed the massacre of a boatload of refugees

2 : a cruel or wanton (see wanton entry 1 sense 1a) murder

3 : a wholesale slaughter of animals Residents engaged in a citywide cat massacre.

4 : an act of complete destruction the author's massacre of traditional federalist presuppositions— R. G. McCloskey the Puritan massacre of statues and pictures— Robert Hughes

massacre

verb

massacred; massacring\ ˈma-si-k(ə-)riŋ

Definition of massacre (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb

1 : to kill by massacre

2 : mangle sense 2 words were misspelled and syntax massacred— Bice Clemow

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Examples of massacre in a Sentence

Noun The game turned out to be a complete massacre. the infamous massacre of more than 200 Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota Verb Hundreds have been massacred in the uprising. The other team really massacred us on Saturday. He really massacred that song.

Recent Examples on the Web: Noun At several barricades on the morning of the massacre, protesters tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves with these weapons. — Washington Post, 25 Aug. 2021 In the wake of the massacre, confusion reigned in government offices, including the passport office. — Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, 16 Aug. 2021 But at least part of the reason for Israel’s delay may have nothing to do with Mr. Zerón or the facts of the massacre. — New York Times, 15 July 2021 Searches of two other Tulsa locations where massacre victims are believed to have been buried are planned. — Ken Miller, Star Tribune, 25 June 2021 On Tuesday, President Joe Biden became the first president to honor the massacre victims in Tulsa. — CBS News, 4 June 2021 Experts led in part by the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey began mapping and prepping the site on Tuesday near the headstones of massacre victims Eddie Lockard and Reuben Everett. — Carma Hassan, CNN, 4 June 2021 One hundred years later, many of the massacre victims' bodies have never been found. — Kiara Brantley-jones , Tonya Simpson, ABC News, 2 June 2021 The city’s white, Republican mayor, G.T. Bynum, doesn’t support paying direct reparations to massacre victims and descendants. — Aaron Morrison, Chron, 1 June 2021 Recent Examples on the Web: Verb To underscore the seriousness of the defendant’s plan to massacre Jews, the prosecutor produced copious abstracts from Balliet’s writing. — Dorothy Rabinowitz, WSJ, 24 June 2021 Within months, mobs in Clinton, Mississippi would massacre dozens of African Americans; the next year, more would die in Hamburg, South Carolina. — Chris Lehmann, The New Republic, 21 June 2021 The end product is a gummy, poisonous net called a neutrophil extracellular trap, or NET, that can massacre scores of microbes at once. — Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 17 June 2021 Were the protesters worried that vengeful Azerbaijanis, at the time advancing victoriously across land Armenians seized in 1994, would massacre any Armenians left behind in the retreat? — Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 31 May 2021 This kind of visibility has added to the climate of hatred that encouraged a white nationalist last year to drive ten hours to massacre twenty-three Latinx people in El Paso. — Graciela Mochkofsky, The New Yorker, 14 Oct. 2020 In Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country, thousands of Rohingya Muslims were massacred by military forces in 2017. — Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2019 The finds were uncovered at three sites in the Arnsberg forest, where members of the Waffen-SS and German army massacred 208 Polish and Russian forced laborers in March 1945, just before the end of World War II. — Fox News, 21 May 2020 In July 1995 Bosnian Serb authorities massacred more than eight thousand Muslim prisoners at Srebrenica, a slaughter that provoked public outrage in Europe and the US. — Steve Coll, The New York Review of Books, 13 May 2020

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'massacre.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.