Meanings
- rareuncountableThe killing of a cow.
He has a great reverence for the bovine species, for Apis is sacred to the Kashmiri…and in Kashmir “vaccicide” is a capital crime.
1900, Ashley Carus-Wilson, Irene Petrie: Missionary to Kashmir (3rd ed., 1901), ch. xi, p. 2492 more examples
Cow killing in Cashmere is punished as a worse crime than homicide! Travellers to Cashmere in those days — entering the valley by the Shupeyon route — will perhaps remember the skeleton of a man hanging in rusty chains from a prominent bough of the first large tree which met the eye on emerging from the Heerpore pass. That wretch was hanged for vaccicide…a terrible example of Maharajah Golaub Sing’s Draconian laws!
1887, David John Falconer Newall, The Highlands of India II: Field Sports and Travel in India, sect. i, ch. iv, p. 49Anthony Burgess is not confessing to the crime of culpable vaccicide. Is he then using jargon? He has no need to give a show of learning; he might admit, though, that the sayers of “vaccicidal,” if they existed, would be using jargon.
1987, Alfred Phillips, The Lawyer and Society, p. 127
Origin
Formed in English as vacci- (“cow”) + -cide (“killing”). Compare the earlier French vaccicide (“a killer of cows”). First attested in 1865.
Full word history & related roots →Translations
Finnish lehmän tappo
- lehmän tappokilling of a cow
Cite this entry
vaccicide. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/vaccicide
“vaccicide.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/vaccicide. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “vaccicide,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/vaccicide.
Source: vaccicide on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.