reginacide

English

Alternative forms

• reginicide

Etymology

From Latin rēgīna (“queen”) +‎ -cide.

Noun

reginacide (countable and uncountable, plural reginacides) (uncommon)

1. (countable) One who kills a queen.

   Coordinate term: regicide

   • 1950, Geoffrey Grigson, The Crest on the Silver: An Autobiography, London: Cresset Press, page 167:

     However, my old enemy, Miss [Edith] Sitwell, is now enthroned. I was not at the coronation, I am not among her subjects. But I have no inclination left to be a reginacide or even a jeering republican.

   • 1979, John Bellamy, “Notes”, in The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (Studies in Social History), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto, Ont.; Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, →ISBN, note 5, page 266:

     Another report connects the incident with the trial of the would-be reginacide John Somervyle (1 Anderson 106).

   • 1961 November 24, “His High Dedication and Her Majesty”, in Life, volume 51, number 21, New York, N.Y.: Time Inc., →ISSN, page 45, column 1:

     Touring Ghana with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (next page), His High Dedication Kwame Nkrumah—that is his title—has learned that the image of a true queen is not easily removed from the hearts of ex-colonial Africans. Increasingly unpopular because of his police-state methods, Nkrumah used the queen’s visit as a pretext to jail dozens of his political opponents as would-be reginacides.

   • 2000, Barbara Yorke, “Æthelbald, Offa and the Patronage of Nunneries”, in David Hill, Margaret Worthington, editors, Æthelbald and Offa: Two Eighth-Century Kings of Mercia: Papers from a Conference Held in Manchester in 2000, Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (BAR British Series; 383), Oxford, Oxfordshire: Archaeopress, published 2005, →ISBN, page 43, column 2:

     George Henderson has proposed recently that Guthlac’s hasty retreat to Repton in 697 could be explained by his early secular career having been brought to an abrupt end by an involvement in the murder of Queen Osthryth of Mercia (wife of King Æthelred) that same year – the two events appear together in the annal entry for 697 in the Worcester Chronicle. Henderson would interpret Guthlac’s sudden discovery of a religious vocation as a means of escaping a worse fate when retribution was sought for the queen’s death. Presumably Guthlac’s retreat to the fenlands could then be seen as a form of political exile not unlike that of Æthelbald, and in this context Henderson draws attention to the attempted assassination of Guthlac by Beccel as perhaps being not so much a hagiographical motif as a real attempt by the Mercian regime to take revenge on a reginacide.

   • 2012, Simon Law, “Cambridge – golden willows by the riverside”, in Out of London Walks: Great Escapes by Britain’s Best Walking Tour Company, [London]: Virgin Books, →ISBN, page 19:

     The tales depicted are from the Old and New Testaments but the faces and clothes are of sixteenth-century England. Henry [VIII] himself appears, his face attached to the persona of King Solomon, who receives gifts from the Queen of Sheba. Was that the artists’ cheeky prank? Or their flattering of the fearful, forty-inch-chest reginacide?

2. (countable and uncountable) The killing of a queen (female monarch or wife of a king).

   Coordinate term: regicide

   • 1840, The Reginacide, or, An Attack on the Constitution, London: H. Hilliard, […]:

     [A sketch of Edward Oxford’s attempted assassination of Queen Victoria.]

   • 1898 September 24, Edgar Saltus, “The Empress of Austria”, in Robert J[oseph] Collier, editor, Collier’s Weekly: An Illustrated Journal of Art, Literature and Current Events, volume XXI, number 25, New York, N.Y.: Peter Fenelon Collier, page 2, column 1:

     It is related that once upon a time in a small room of a large house three little girls were seated. They were pretty, they were poor, and they were princesses. Before them stood a fat man with a white beard. […] To the first he said: You will be a duchess and be burned to death. To the second: You will be a queen and fly for your life. To the third: You will be an empress and go mad on your throne. […] In any event, though the astrologer may have foreseen regalias, he could not foretell the reginacide.

   • 1984, Albert C[ook] Outler, “Wesley and His Sources”, in The Works of John Wesley, bicentennial edition, volume 1 (Sermons, I, 1–33), Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, →ISBN, Introduction, footnote 33, page 77:

     In view of the permission of reginacide in Pius V’s excommunication of Elizabeth I (Regnans in excelsis, 1570), most English Protestants (and Wesley with them) were convinced that Roman Catholics were disloyal citizens, ex professo.

   • 2002, Alan Gordon, chapter 6, in A Death in the Venetian Quarter: A Medieval Mystery, New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Minotaur, →ISBN, page 80:

     When I saw the size of the bruise under her whiteface, I had to be restrained from storming Blachernae and committing reginacide.

3. (countable and uncountable) The killing of a queen (reproductive female insect).
   • 1886 December 2, F. Maule Campbell, “The Habits and Economy of Our Social Wasps”, in John Hopkinson, editor, Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club, volume IV (October, 1885, to October, 1887), London: Gurney & Jackson, […], published 1888, page 154:

     But the wasps make no such migration. The males and the old queens and workers all die when the autumn frosts set in, while the young queens, which have yet to lay their eggs, hie away to find protection in some quiet nook, where they remain until the first bright days of spring. It is then that they sally forth in search of a suitable place to commence their nests, and frequently fall victims to some one who destroys them as depredators of fruit and progenitors of countless enemies of humanity. Should any of my hearers ever be induced to commit such a regicide, or rather reginacide, I beg they will remember that the insect itself and its offspring, if allowed to survive, would remove from both field and garden incalculable numbers of small caterpillars and other larvæ which are so harmful to vegetation.

   • 1898 July 5, R. C. A., “Strengthening Swarms”, in Tho[ma]s W[illia]m Cowan, W[illiam] Broughton Carr, editors, The British Bee Journal, and Bee-Keepers’ Adviser, volume XXVI (January–December, 1898), London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co., […], published 1898 July 21, Queries and Replies, page 287, column 2:

     How can I “sprinkle peppermint on the bees” between the frames of the hive? I suppose I am to move them all from their places in order to do it, and I must also more them in order to find the queen and commit reginacide.

   • 1900 June 14, E. E. Hasty, “The Afterthought: The ‘Old Reliable’ seen thru New and Unreliable Glasses”, in George W. York, editor, American Bee Journal, 40th year, number 24, Chicago, Ill., Robber-Bees and Balled Queens, page 374, column 1:

     On page 297 [“Queens Not Balled Thru Robbers”], that quotation from a foreign bee-paper, about the foolishness of thinking that robber-bees ball a queen, is probably all right in the main. Robbers are indeed there for honey—not for reginacide—but perchance no one interferes, and after awhile the honey is gone, and the hive is filled with a miscellaneous crowd largely new comers, who are like a city mob, “the more part know not wherefore they are come together.”

   • 2012 April 27, Sidney Owitz, “The Ten Plagues”, in A Mosaic, Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 181:

     Whenever a Florida home-owner sees a small crater-like opening with a mound around it in the soil on his property he will treat the area with fire-ant poison which will clear up the area, but the fire-ants move to an adjacent area. The loyal fire-ant soldiers will immediately bring home the poison to feed their queen. Little do they realize that they are committing reginacide, or queen-killing! Unwittingly they are murdering their mother.

Related terms

• Regina
• vicereine

Translations

one who kills a queen

French: réginicide m or f by sense

the killing of a queen

French: réginicide m German: Königinmord m