omnicide

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

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Noun

omnicide (countable and uncountable, plural omnicides)

  1. (countable and uncountable) The total extinction of the human species as a result of human action. Most commonly it refers to human extinction through nuclear warfare, but it can also refer to such extinction through other means such as global anthropogenic ecological catastrophe.
    • 1995, Richard Rhodes, chapter 27, in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb:
      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 Holocaust. Ours would have been the historic omnicide.
  2. (countable, rare) Someone or something that causes total destruction.
    • 1965, Nature Study, volumes 19–23, Morehead, Ky.: American Nature Study Society, →ISSN, →OCLC:
      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.
    • 1985, Fanfare, volume 8, Tenafly, N.J.: Fanfare, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 222:
      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.
    • 2020, Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, Falmouth, Cornwall: Urbanomic Media, →ISBN, page 292:
      [T]hese ‘super-bombs’ shatter a civilisation’s own planet but ‘the nuclear jets from the explosion could even activate their Sun, transforming it into a giant hydrogen bomb’. Perhaps supernovas are twinkling omnicides in the sky.

Translations

See also

References

  • Somerville, John. 1981. Soviet Marxism and nuclear war : an international debate : from the proceedings of the special colloquium of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy. Greenwood Press. Pg.151
  • Goodman, Lisl Marburg and Lee Ann Hoff. 1990. Omnicide: The Nuclear Dilemma. New York: Praeger.
  • Landes, Daniel (ed.). 1991. Confronting Omnicide: Jewish Reflections on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Jason Aronson Publishers.

Further reading

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