Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who voluntarily destroys his own life; a suicide.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A suicide.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun One who commits self-murder; a suicide.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From self- +‎ murderer or self-murder +‎ -er.

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Examples

  • Surely not a murderer, not even quite a self-murderer, though by all the signs he had come very close.

    A Rare Benedictine Peters, Ellis, 1913- 1988

  • But in the instance which is now stated by the intended self-murderer, there is no attempt at palliation of any kind.

    Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 Various

  • He is worse than a beast, and is a self-murderer, who drinks to others 'good health, and robs himself of his own.

    Select Temperance Tracts American Tract Society

  • Yes, thou poor degraded creature who art daily lifting the poisoned bowl to thy lips, cease to avoid the unhallowed ground in which the self-murderer is interred, and wonder no longer that the sun should shine, and the rain fall, and the grass look green upon his grave.

    Select Temperance Tracts American Tract Society

  • The Spanish bigot was rarely a suicide, for the rights of Christian burial and repose in consecrated ground were denied to the remains of the self-murderer.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 Various

  • He that throws away his life, when it might have been, and ought to have been preserved, is a self-murderer.

    Barnes New Testament Notes 1949

  • In the Western world men say in kindness, kind or unkind, that a self-murderer suffered from temporary aberration of the mind, and the words are supposed to bring surcease of sorrow to relatives.

    Idle Comments 1905

  • The impressive thoughts, the obvious thoughts -- that if their creeds were sound, a soul was about to enter into eternal torment, and that their lives would be violently changed, and that they would be branded before the world as the wife and the daughters of a defaulter and a self-murderer -- did not by any means absorb their minds in those first hours.

    Leonora Arnold Bennett 1899

  • Upon their tombstones might justly be graven, "Here lies a self-murderer."

    Plain Facts for Old and Young John Harvey Kellogg 1897

  • But it seems there was some superstition about permitting a self-murderer to be buried in the same field as decent folks.

    The Outlet Andy Adams 1897

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