internecine.
Mutually destructive; most often applied to warfare.
Meaning & usage
Mutually destructive; most often applied to warfare.
Internecine strife in Gaza claimed its most senior victim yesterday when militants assassinated one of the most hated security chiefs there.
Characterized by struggle within a group, usually applied to an ethnic or familial relationship.
The Mongol people were plagued by internecine conflict until Genghis Khan unified them by focusing their aggression outwards on other peoples.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from Latin internecīnus (“deadly”), from internecium (“a massacre, bloodbath; an eradication”) + -īnus. In Latin, the sememe 'between' was here not expressed by the prefix, it instead either had a somewhat emphatic meaning or meant "down, under", comparable to its use in other Latin terms related to death: see interficiō and intereō. The English current sense is thus a reanalysis of the Latin through English inter-.
Try it on your idea.
internecine has 11 characters. Say it out loud, try it alongside a description of your project, and see whether its meaning fits what you want to create.
These are naming prompts. Meanings and pronunciation can vary; existing brand and domain uses have not been checked.
Explore the name generatorA word with a source.
Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.