- massacre
- massacre n Massacre, slaughter, butchery, carnage, pogrom are comparable when they mean a great and often wanton killing of human beings.Massacre implies promiscuous and wholesale slaying, especially of those who are not prepared to defend themselves and can make little or no resistance{
the tyrannous and bloody deed is done, the most arch act of piteous massacre that ever yet this land was guilty of— Shak.
}{the vengeful murder of the mutiny's bloodthirsty ringleader, and the massacre of most of the surviving crew by natives— Dulles
}Slaughter, basically a butcher's term for the killing of animals used as food, suggests extensive and ruthless killing, whether the scene of that killing be a battle or a massacre{the chief... cut his way through the enemy with great slaughter— Irving
}{determined not to repeat the slaughter of the First World War, during which hundreds of thousands of soldiers were sacrificed in fruitless frontal attacks— Bethe
}{it was no longer a battle but a slaughter .... From nine o'clock in the morning until seven o'clock in the evening, when it began to get dark, the killing went on— Graves
}Butchery adds to slaughter the implication of exceeding cruelty or of cold-blooded indifference to the sufferings of the victims{boasting of his fights, his cruelties and his butcheries— Kingsley
}{thus was the butchery waged while the sun clomb Heaven's eastern steep— Shelley
}Carnage is often not easily distinguishable from slaughter, except that it sometimes carries additional connotations similar to those of massacre{a slight resistance was followed by a dreadful carnage— Gibbon
}{war and all its deeds of carnage— Whitman
}Pogrom applies especially to an organized massacre of helpless people carried on usually with the connivance of officials. It is often applied specifically to such a massacre of Jews, especially in one of the European countries{the pogroms at Gomel and Kishinev in Russia in 1903
}{he carried on a full-scale pogrom against the Jews, slaughtering hundreds of thousands— New Republic
}{the Hindus interpret every manifestation of individual violence ... as the launching of a pogrom against them— Edmond Taylor
}Analogous words: assassination, murdering or murder, slaying, killing (see corresponding verbs at KILL)
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.