internecine
/ˌɪntɚˈnɛsin/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.28 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
4
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Mutually destructive; most often applied to warfare.
adj
Characterized by struggle within a group, usually applied to an ethnic or familial relationship.
Example Sentences
- "Internecine strife in Gaza claimed its most senior victim yesterday when militants assassinated one of the most hated security chiefs there."
- "The Mongol people were plagued by internecine conflict until Genghis Khan unified them by focusing their aggression outwards on other peoples."
- "During the year of my engagement — 1869 — while I was out on the lecture platform, the daily letter that came for me generally brought me news from the front — by which expression I refer to the internecine war that was always going on in a friendly way between these two orthographists about the spelling of words."
- "Having survived “The Long Night,” Daenerys will now be turning her attention back to the problem that originally vexed her: Cersei Lannister. It will be interesting to see how the show tries to raise the stakes of an internecine squabble between competing monarchs when compared to an existential threat to humanity’s very existence, but this series has always excelled when it goes deep on the machinations of political chicanery."
Etymology
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-.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌɪntɚˈnɛsin/
- British English: /ˌɪntəˈniːsaɪn/