Who invented the word “genocidio,” and what does it mean?

“Genocidio” is a word that didn’t exist before World War II. In 1944, Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust himself, decided plain “killing” wasn’t strong enough for what the Nazis were doing to entire groups. He built a new word by fusing Greek genos, “race” or “tribe,” with the Latin suffix -cidio, “killing,” giving a crime that had no name of its own.

Lemkin introduced the word in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and spent years pushing for it to become a legal category, not just a description — the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948, largely due to his lobbying. Spanish genocidio and English “genocide” are near-identical coinages: both fuse the same Greek root with the same Latin suffix, so the word crossed languages almost untranslated.