murdering

Pluralmurderings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of unlawfully and deliberately killing another person.

   The murdering of unarmed civilians provoked outrage across the country.

   Years of murdering had left the gang's leader without a trace of remorse.

   Similarkilling, slaughter, slaying

   Note

   A noun that can work as a mass noun or as a count noun. The murdering of civilians names the act in general, while the plural murderings treats each killing as a separate deed, as in "these licensed murderings" from James Silk Buckingham's Oriental Herald (1826). Murder names the crime; this form keeps the sense of an action being carried out. It most naturally takes an of-phrase that names the victims.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of murder.

   Investigators believe the suspect had been murdering victims for years before his arrest.

   Murdering a key witness only made the case against him stronger.

   Note

   One spelling doing two jobs: after a form of be it builds the progressive (was murdering), and as a gerund it heads a noun phrase while still taking a direct object (murdering a witness). It carries the verb's looser senses too, so a singer murdering a song is botching it, and a team murdering its rivals is beating them decisively. With a determiner before it and no object after it, the word has become the noun for the act.

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