Definition
The killing of a wife by her husband. The term carries two senses: (1) the act itself — the homicide of a wife by her husband; and (2) the person who commits that act — a husband who murders his wife. Both Black's editions expressly note that uxoricide is not a technical term of the law; it is a descriptive or classificatory label drawn from Latin, used in legal literature and scholarship rather than in charging instruments, statutes, or formal judicial proceedings. Homicide law governs the act; uxoricide simply names the relationship between killer and victim.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): One who murders one's wife.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The murder of a wife by her husband; one who murders his wife.
Common and legal meaning are essentially identical here, and both sources agree precisely with the legal dictionaries. The only meaningful note is directional: "one's wife" in Wiktionary broadens the term slightly beyond the husband-wife relationship to encompass any person who murders their wife (regardless of the killer's own gender), while the legal and Webster's definitions fix the actor as the husband. This distinction has no practical legal consequence given that uxoricide is not operative legal terminology in any jurisdiction, but it surfaces occasionally in modern scholarly writing.
Common Confusion
Uxoricide is frequently paired or confused with mariticide (the killing of a husband by a wife) and parricide (used loosely to describe killings within the family generally). In older legal literature, parricide sometimes served as an umbrella term covering spousal homicide, which can create indexing and search problems in historical sources. Uxoricide should not be confused with femicide, a modern sociological and comparative-law term referring to the killing of women because of their gender; femicide is broader in scope and carries distinct legal implications in jurisdictions where it has been codified.
Why It Matters in Research
Because uxoricide is not a term of art, researchers will not find it in charging documents, jury instructions, or statutory indexes. Its value in the Law Mind corpus is primarily in treatises, law review literature, and comparative criminal law materials where the term organizes discussion of spousal homicide as a distinct social and legal phenomenon.
Historical research presents a specific trap: pre-20th century common law treated spousal homicide asymmetrically. A wife who killed her husband was prosecuted for petty treason, not mere homicide, until the Treason Act 1828 in England abolished that distinction. A husband who killed his wife was subject to ordinary homicide law — and in some periods faced reduced culpability under doctrines permitting a degree of physical "correction." Researchers reading 18th- or early-19th-century sources discussing uxoricide must account for this asymmetry; the legal consequences were not simply the mirror image of mariticide.
In modern scholarship, uxoricide appears heavily in criminological and domestic violence literature, and some comparative law materials from civil law jurisdictions use cognate terms (femicidio, feminicidio) that overlap with but are not equivalent to uxoricide. Researchers moving between common law and civil law sources should be alert to this terminological divergence.
Corpus connections: entries for HOMICIDE, MANSLAUGHTER, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, PETTY TREASON, and FEMICIDE will provide the operative legal framework that uxoricide itself does not supply.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's editions are in full agreement: uxoricide means the killing of a wife by her husband, or the person who does so, and it is not a technical term of the law. The 2nd edition entry appears as part of a compressed Latin maxim section, which reflects the compiler's treatment of the term as learned vocabulary rather than doctrine. Neither edition provides a definition beyond this bare description, and neither cites authority for the term's use — consistent with its status as descriptive rather than operative language.
Webster's 1913 matches the legal dictionaries exactly, which underscores that uxoricide lived in general educated usage as much as in legal writing. What the historical dictionaries do not address — and what a researcher must supply from other sources — is the substantive legal treatment of the act: the degrees of homicide that applied, the historical role of provocation defenses in spousal killings, and the trajectory of domestic violence law that gradually stripped away the mitigating doctrines that once surrounded uxoricide in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
No jurisdiction uses uxoricide as a statutory category or charging term. In all common law jurisdictions, the act is prosecuted under general homicide statutes. Some civil law jurisdictions have enacted femicidio or feminicidio provisions that may encompass uxoricide as a subset, but these are distinct concepts with their own elements and penalties.