Word.ws English Dictionary

husbandicide

husbandicide noun: the killing of one's husband.

Noun

husbandicide (uncountable)

  1. (nonce-word) The killing of one's husband.
    • 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.1889 September 21, The Saturday Evening Post, volume 69, number 11, Philadelphia, PA, page 11
    • 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.1892 April 9, “Professional Husband Killers.”, in Victoria Daily Times, Victoria, B.C., page 12
    Synonyms:
    mariticide, viricide

Examples of husbandicide in a sentence

  • Arsenic in the soup is fast supplanting firearms as a husbandicide among the more dashing members of the younger set.[1923 September 7, Madison Capital Times, volume 12, number 67, Madison, WI, page 16:
  • I thought he'd forgotten to order them, and I was quietly plotting husbandicide."1959, Nina Farewell, Someone to Love, Panther Books, published 1961, page 71:
  • 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.2005, Anne Kingston, The Meaning of Wife, New York City, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, →ISBN, page 196:

Synonyms of husbandicide

Origin of husbandicide

From husband + -i- + -cide.

Questions about husbandicide

What does husbandicide mean?
Husbandicide means the killing of one's husband.
How do you use husbandicide in a sentence?
Arsenic in the soup is fast supplanting firearms as a husbandicide among the more dashing members of the younger set.
What part of speech is husbandicide?
Husbandicide is a noun.

Words near husbandicide in the dictionary

  1. husbanded
  2. husbanded up
  3. husbander
  4. husbanders
  5. husbandhood
  6. husbandicide
  7. husbanding
  8. husbanding up
  9. husbandish
  10. husbandland
  11. husbandlands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: husbandicide (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “husbandicide.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/husbandicide. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.