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Attacks by year 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Years 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 | ||
List of events for which one of the commonly accepted names includes the word massacre.
Massacre is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people or (less commonly) animals; carnage, butchery, slaughter in numbers". It also states that the term is used "in the names of certain massacres of history".
The first recorded use in English of the word massacre in the name of an event is "Marlowe (c. 1600) (title) The massacre at Paris", (a reference to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre). Massacre can also be used as a verb, as "To kill (people or, less commonly, animals) in numbers, esp. brutally and indiscriminately". The first usage of which was "(c. 1588) Men which make no conscience for gaine sake, to breake the law of the æternall, and massaker soules (...) are dangerous subjects", and this usage is not recorded in this list.
Massacre is also used figuratively to describe dramatic events that did not involve any deaths, such as the "Hilo massacre" and the "Saturday Night Massacre". Such events are not listed in the table below.
List of events
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