self-sacrifice

plural self-sacrifices

1. countableuncountableThe giving up of one's own benefit for the good of others.

   Caring for a loved one with a chronic illness inevitably involves self-sacrifice.

   4 more examples

   Whatever he was suffering, it was she who had caused it; he had vacated his house on account of her. She was not worth such self-sacrifice; she should not have accepted it of him.

   1886 May – 1887 April, Thomas Hardy, chapter VIII, in The Woodlanders […], volume III, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 165

   Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer’s wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice.

   1918, Willa Cather, My Ántonia, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 1, p. 292

   Turians have a strong inclination towards public service and self-sacrifice, so they tend to be poor entrepreneurs.

   2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Turians: Culture Codex entry

   […] he turned his resourceful mind away from the serene life of a don on grass lawns in Cambridge to one of self-sacrifice and pure devotion in the thorny bushes of Africa.

   2012, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, chapter 15, in In the House of the Interpreter, New York: Anchor Books, published 2015, pages 43–44

   Synonyms: self-abnegation, self-denial

2. countableuncountableThe act of making the ultimate sacrifice of giving up one's life for a cause.

   His brave self-sacrifice won him a posthumous medal, but I think he'd have preferred to receive it in person.

   2 more examples

   [Scott’s Last Expedition] had been one of my own favourite books. It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own.

   1951, Graham Greene, The End of the Affair, New York: Pocket Books, Book 5, Chapter 6, p. 215

   However, something once happened on the railway there which showed the very best of mankind: heroism, duty, self-sacrifice and calm professionalism under terrible pressure. It is a story which gives us far, far better reasons for remembering this attractive little town, which without these heroes would have been blown to smithereens in a gigantic explosion. (Two railwaymen lost their lives in 1944 when a wagon in an ammunition train caught fire and blew up, an even worse disaster was averted however.)

   2022 January 12, Benedict le Vay, “The heroes of Soham...”, in RAIL, number 948, page 42