Word.ws English Dictionary

omnicide

omnicide noun: the total extinction of the human species as a result of human action, most commonly through nuclear warfare, but also through other means such as global anthropogenic ecological catastrophe.

Noun

omnicide (countable and uncountable, plural omnicides)

  1. The total extinction of the human species as a result of human action, most commonly through nuclear warfare, but also through other means such as global anthropogenic ecological catastrophe.
    • Of course, civilization exacts a price, which we and our ancestors have been paying for millennia. But since the high technology of capitalism and the whip of the marketplace have become so efficient, the price has become correspondingly onerous. So onerous that the dread word “genocide” is being...1989, L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books, page 238
    • How extraordinary that Curtis LeMay believed for the rest of his life that the United States “lost” the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. If John Kennedy had followed LeMay's advice [to bomb Cuba and take out the missile sites], history would have forgotten the Nazis and their terrible...1995, Richard Rhodes, chapter 27, in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
  2. (countable, rare) Someone or something that causes total destruction.
    • Our soils have been made sterile over many areas from pesticides, which have been really omnicides. Today, DDT as the greatest culprit, and one which has brought immense profit to the pesticide producing industry, has been spread worldwide.1965, Nature Study, volumes 19–23, Morehead, Ky.: American Nature Study Society, →ISSN, →OCLC
    • Ilmari? First name of a would-be Turkish papicide? A Libyan omnicide? No, merely that of an apparently mild-mannered Finn whose studies put him at the crossroads of the major influences so patently reflected in his music—those of Rachmaninoff and of the French Impressionists.1985, Fanfare, volume 8, Tenafly, N.J.: Fanfare, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 222

Examples of omnicide in a sentence

  • So onerous that the dread word “genocide” is being supplanted by even more ominous words—“omnicide” and “geocide.”1989, L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History, New York: Pantheon Books, page 238:
  • Ours would have been the historic omnicide.1995, Richard Rhodes, chapter 27, in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb:
  • Perhaps supernovas are twinkling omnicides in the sky.2020, Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, Falmouth, Cornwall: Urbanomic Media, →ISBN, page 292:

Forms of omnicide

pluralomnicides

Origin of omnicide

From omni- (“all”) + -cide (“killing; killer”).

Questions about omnicide

What does omnicide mean?
Omnicide means the total extinction of the human species as a result of human action, most commonly through nuclear warfare, but also through other means such as global anthropogenic ecological catastrophe.
How do you use omnicide in a sentence?
So onerous that the dread word “genocide” is being supplanted by even more ominous words—“omnicide” and “geocide.”
What part of speech is omnicide?
Omnicide is a noun.
What is the plural of omnicide?
The plural of omnicide is omnicides.

Words near omnicide in the dictionary

  1. omnicausality
  2. omnicause
  3. omnichannel
  4. omnichromatic
  5. omnicidal
  6. omnicide
  7. omnicides
  8. omnicognizance
  9. omnicognizant
  10. omnicomparativist
  11. omnicompetence

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: omnicide (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-omnicide.wav.

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