Dictionary

countermurder en · NOUN

Etymology

From counter- + murder.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) A murder in response to another murder.
   • I go out with him on tour in his armored car through Bujumbura's ethnically cleansed neighborhoods to talk to the adolescents with the Kalashnikovs and grenades, who for the price of a few beers will firebomb a street. He gets out and confronts them, telling them that the cycle of murder and countermurder must stop, or they will all be swept away. 1997, Michael Ignatieff, “The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust”, in The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, New York NY: Henry Holt and Company, published 1998, →ISBN, page 86:

Forms