# assassin

Pronunciation: say "uh-SAS-in" /əˈsæsɪn/

## Noun

1. A person who deliberately kills someone, especially a hired killer of a public or political figure, or any ruthless killer.
   - Simple: A person who kills someone on purpose, often an important person, sometimes for money.
   - _A hired assassin shot the opposition leader outside his home._
   - _The senator survived only because the assassin's bullet hit his briefcase._
2. Someone belonging to the Nizari Ismaili community of Muslims during its Alamut period.
   - Simple: A member of a Muslim group, the Nizari Ismailis, during the Alamut period long ago.
   - _The historian reconstructs how an Assassin of the twelfth century might have been trained._
   - _Crusader chronicles are full of rumors about the Assassins and their leader._

## Verb

3. To murder a prominent person, typically for political reasons. *(nonstandard)*
   - Simple: To kill an important person, like a leader, on purpose.

## Other meanings

- (noun) In algebra, a somewhat humorous name for an associated prime of a module.

## Origin

From French assassin or Italian assassino, ultimately from variants of Arabic ḥašīšī, an abusive name for the Nizari Ismailis related to the word for hashish. The mathematical sense was introduced by Bourbaki as a play on the notation Ass(M): an associated prime is the annihilator of an element, so it is said to kill that element.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/assassin (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).