• urbicide •
Pronunciation: êr-bê-said • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, mass (uncountable)
Meaning: Destruction of a city or its character.
Notes: Today's is a Good Word so new Onelook can only find it in three marginal dictionaries. It can be found in the grandfather of them all, the Oxford English Dictionary with the earliest published example from 1963—an infant word in linguistic time. We may assume all the derivatives of the many words containing -cide: urbicidal, urbicidally, urbicidality, and urbicidology.
In Play: The most obvious example of this word is what is happening to Ukrainian cities today: "The cost of resurrecting all the Ukrainian victims of urbicide will be tremendous." Urbicide may only involve the character, nature of a city: "Coastal cities have failed to resist the urbicidal forces of beachside urban development."
Word History: Today's Good Word was first coined by science fiction author Michael Moorcock and published in 1963. Moorcock took the Latin word for "city", urbs, urbis, and combined it with the English combining form -cide, found in words like homicide, suicide, and fratricide. Latin urbs appears in English urban and urbane "citified, elegant". Its origin is a mystery. Pokorny thinks it is a mangled form of PIE gherdh-/ghordh- "to enclose, surround", but others think it came from PIE uerbh-/uorbh- "to turn" in the sense of "to encircle". Both refer to the fact that ancient cities were walled. Both explanations fall afoul of many obstacles. (Let there be no obstacle to our gratitude to Luciano Eduardo de Oliveira, editor of the GW series and long-time contributor, for suggesting today's very topical Good Word.)