CARNAGE

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does carnage mean? 

• CARNAGE (noun)
  The noun CARNAGE has 1 sense:

1. the savage and excessive killing of many people

  Familiarity information: CARNAGE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CARNAGE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The savage and excessive killing of many people

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

butchery; carnage; mass murder; massacre; slaughter

Hypernyms ("carnage" is a kind of...):

execution; murder; slaying (unlawful premeditated killing of a human being by a human being)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "carnage"):

battue; bloodbath; bloodletting; bloodshed (indiscriminate slaughter)

Instance hyponyms:

Alamo (a siege and massacre at a mission in San Antonio in 1836; Mexican forces under Santa Anna besieged and massacred American rebels who were fighting to make Texas independent of Mexico)

Battle of Little Bighorn; Battle of the Little Bighorn; Custer's Last Stand; Little Bighorn (a battle in Montana near the Little Bighorn River between United States cavalry under Custer and several groups of Native Americans (1876); Custer was pursuing Sioux led by Sitting Bull; Custer underestimated the size of the Sioux forces (which were supported by Cheyenne warriors) and was killed along with all his command)

 Context examples 

Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother?

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

He still breathed the air, which bit his lungs with a painful sweetness; and dimly he saw and heard, with passing spells of blindness and deafness, the flashes of sight and sound again wherein he saw the hunters of Ivan falling to their deaths, and his own brothers fringing the carnage and filling the air with the tumult of their cries and weapons, and, far above, the women and children loosing the great rocks that leaped like things alive and thundered down.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

From the pools of blood and the enormous lumps of flesh scattered in every direction over the green sward we imagined at first that a number of animals had been killed, but on examining the remains more closely we discovered that all this carnage came from one of these unwieldy monsters, which had been literally torn to pieces by some creature not larger, perhaps, but far more ferocious, than itself.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)