Definition
The killing of one's guest by a host, or of one's host by a guest. The term functions both as a label for the actor (one who commits such a killing) and, less commonly, as a designation for the act itself. It belongs to the family of Latin-derived homicide terms that identify the victim's relationship to the killer as the defining characteristic of the offense — paralleling terms such as parricide (killing of a parent), fratricide (killing of a brother), and uxoricide (killing of a wife).
As a category of criminal law, hospiticide does not constitute a freestanding offense under modern statutory law in any common-law jurisdiction. It is treated as a species of homicide or murder, with the host-guest relationship potentially bearing on motive, aggravation, or circumstantial evidence rather than on the definition of the crime itself.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who kills his guest or host; alternatively, the act itself.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not catalogued. The term does not appear in Webster's 1913, consistent with its status as a learned Latinate legal term rather than an ordinary English word.
The common and legal meanings here are essentially identical — the term carries no gap between lay and legal usage. It is, however, so rarely encountered outside legal dictionaries and classical references that researchers should be alert to its appearance as an archaic or rhetorical label rather than a technical term of art with operative legal consequences.
Common Confusion
Hospiticide is occasionally confused with hosticide, a variant spelling or near-synonym sometimes used to mean the same thing. Researchers should search both forms in historical sources. Neither term should be confused with hostage-related offenses or with hospitalism, a distinct concept in tort and medical law.
Why It Matters in Research
Hospiticide is a relic term — it appears in legal dictionaries as a definitional entry but does not anchor a body of case law or statutory doctrine. Its primary research value is taxonomic: understanding it helps researchers map the classical homicide vocabulary that structured early common-law treatises and jury charges.
Researchers working in historical criminal law sources (particularly pre-20th century) may encounter hospiticide in treatises organizing homicide categories by the victim-killer relationship. These classical taxonomies were influential in shaping how courts discussed aggravating circumstances, and the host-guest relationship has appeared in aggravation arguments where the killing involved a breach of trust or domestic protection.
In corpus research, note that the Rapalje & Lawrence entry is corrupted in available digital sources — the dictionary text runs the hospiticide entry into an adjacent entry on horses and market overt, which is an OCR or typesetting artifact, not substantive content. Do not treat the horse-law material as part of the hospiticide definition.
Because the term has no modern statutory home, searches for it in case law databases will return very sparse results. Researchers seeking historical instances of host-guest killings prosecuted as murder or manslaughter should search the underlying facts and relationship descriptions rather than the term itself.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries define hospiticide consistently and briefly: one who kills a guest or host. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier's are in complete agreement. Rapalje & Lawrence nominally includes the term but the entry is not independently developed — the available text is garbled by a typesetting collision with the adjacent horse-law entry, rendering it unreliable for any purpose beyond confirming the term's presence in the dictionary.
No source dictionary provides extended analysis, distinguishes subtypes, or connects the term to specific statutes or cases. This uniform brevity across all four sources confirms that hospiticide was understood as a taxonomic label rather than an operative legal category. The historical dictionaries do not flag any jurisdictional variation, which is consistent with the term's role as a descriptive rather than a prescriptive legal concept.
What the historical sources miss: none of them situate hospiticide within the broader classical homicide taxonomy or explain why the host-guest relationship warranted its own term. The answer lies outside the law dictionaries — in Roman law and medieval hospitality norms, where the violation of the duty of protection owed between host and guest carried moral and, at times, legal significance beyond ordinary killing.