carnage

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French carnage , from a Norman or Picard variant Old Northern French) of Old French charnage, from char (“flesh”), or from Vulgar Latin *carnaticum (“slaughter of animals”), itself from Latin carnem, accusative of caro (“flesh”).

noun

  1. Death and destruction.
    Carnage consumes all we’ve ever loved / The innocent blistered by the flame / Trial by fire we burn in shame 2019, Fit for an Autopsy (lyrics and music), “The Sea of Tragic Beasts”
  2. The corpses, gore, etc. that remain after a massacre.
  3. (figurative, sports) Any great loss by a team; a game in which one team wins overwhelmingly.
  4. (figurative, slang) Any chaotic situation.
    The lads had recently returned from a wild summer on the party island of Ibiza, an increasingly popular hotspot for working-class British youth. But this was not a scene of drunken holiday carnage in tacky discos. 2014, Simon Spence, Happy Mondays: Excess All Areas
    Within three hours we'd drunk the place dry. Miraculously, we all made it back on the bus, but I've never seen a more bacchanalian scene of wanton debauchery than the ride back to the hotel. It was total carnage. 2015, Adam Jones, Bomb: My Autobiography
    Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge, and the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. 2017-01-20, Donald Trump, The Inaugural Address

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