Definition
Matricide has two related meanings in legal usage:
1. The act of killing one's own mother.
2. A person who has killed their own mother.
As a substantive offense, matricide is not typically charged as a distinct crime in modern legal systems. It is prosecuted under general homicide statutes — murder or manslaughter, depending on intent and circumstances — with the familial relationship potentially affecting charging decisions, sentencing, or the availability of certain defenses.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The killing of one's mother; also, a person who kills his or her mother.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The murder of a mother by her son or daughter; one who murders one's own mother.
The gap between common and legal meaning is narrow here, but one distinction merits attention: common usage treats "matricide" as inherently murderous, while legal usage requires no such predetermined finding. The act may ultimately be classified as murder, voluntary manslaughter, or another homicide grade depending on the facts. Calling something "matricide" in legal proceedings does not itself establish the degree or culpability of the offense.
Common Confusion
Matricide is sometimes loosely used as a synonym for any killing of a mother, including killings by persons outside the family. Legal and dictionary usage consistently confine the term to the killing of one's own mother. A stranger who kills a woman who happens to be a mother commits homicide, not matricide. The familial relationship — specifically the perpetrator's own mother — is definitional, not incidental.
Why It Matters in Research
Matricide functions primarily as a descriptive or taxonomic term rather than a legal cause of action. Researchers should not expect to find matricide as a charged offense in modern indictments or statutes; look instead to the applicable homicide provisions under which the conduct was prosecuted. The familial relationship may surface in aggravating or mitigating circumstances at sentencing, in mental state evaluations, or in defense theories (such as battered child syndrome or extreme emotional disturbance claims), making the term more relevant to secondary legal literature, forensic psychology materials, and sentencing records than to charging documents themselves.
In historical sources, matricide appears most often in legal encyclopedias and treatises as part of taxonomic lists of homicide subcategories — parricide, fratricide, uxoricide, filicide, and so on — rather than as an operative legal concept. Anderson's cross-reference to HOMICIDE is the correct navigational signal: any research beginning at "matricide" in a historical source should pivot immediately to the homicide entries for substantive law.
Researchers using older sources should also note that these taxonomic terms carried more rhetorical and moral weight in earlier legal writing than they do today. Courts and commentators historically invoked terms like matricide to signal the gravity of an offense, and this framing can affect how evidence, motive, and character were discussed in reported cases from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are in full agreement: matricide denotes the murder of one's mother, and also the person who commits that act. Black's Law Dictionary (both editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary offer nearly identical definitions. Anderson's Dictionary of Law declines to define the term independently and redirects to HOMICIDE — a sound editorial choice that reflects the term's subordinate role within homicide taxonomy. No source attempts to articulate distinct elements or degrees; all treat the term as self-defining within the broader homicide framework. None of the historical dictionaries address the modern prosecutorial reality that no separate "matricide" charge exists, which is the most practically important fact for a researcher to know.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Homicide; Parricide.