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Photographs of the My Lai massacre provoked world outrage and made it an international scandal.

The primary meaning given to massacre (as a noun) by the Oxford English Dictionary(OED) is "The indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people or (less commonly) animals; carnage, butchery, slaughter in numbers; an instance of this" and a similar definition for its use as a verb. The OED goes on to list several other usages of the word both as a noun for example "In the names of certain massacres of history" and as a verb, but most of these other meanings are either less common or figurative (such as the comprehensive defeat of one sports team by another).

Massacre most commonly refers to individual events of deliberate and direct mass killing where the victims have no reasonable means of defense and pose no immediate physical threat to the assailants. If performed by members of the military or other government agents during a time of war, the action may qualify as a war crime. The deliberate mass killing of prisoners of war or civilians is often considered a massacre, however the term does not typically apply to the killing of armed combatants (except figuratively). The term arose^{[dubious – discuss]} with the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in France in 1572 and the word only acquired a general meaning latterly.^{[citation needed]}

Men massacred in Lidice.

In Guatemala, where massacres of Maya people were common during the Civil War, the Historical Clarification Commission agreed on a specific definition: "A massacre shall be considered the execution of five or more people, in the same place, as part of the same operation and whose victims were in an indefensible state."^[1] In Colombia, the term is applied to the murder of at least half a dozen or more at one time.^{[citation needed]}

The term "massacre" is sometimes used more widely to refer to individual, civil, or military mass killings where the deaths were not intentional, or the force used was excessive in comparison to a real or perceived threat.^{[original research?]} Examples include the Boston Massacre and the Kent State Massacre. Often, the application of the term to such killings has distinct political significance in shaping subsequent events, and the term is often used for propagandistic purposes.^{[original research?]}

1. ^ Humberto Sequeira, Chapter 9 : The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification: Database Representation,MAKING THE CASE: Investigating Large Scale Human Rights Violations Using Information Systems and Data Analysis

• List of massacres

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• List of School Shootings