Uxoricide
killing of one's wife
Uxoricide is the killing of one's own wife. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own girlfriend. Conversely, the killing of a husband or boyfriend is called mariticide. It comes from the Latin uxor meaning 'wife' and -cide, from caedere meaning 'to cut, to kill'.
Rates of uxoricide
Though overall rates of spousal violence and homicide in the US have declined since the 1970s, rates of uxoricide are significantly higher than rates of mariticide (the murder of a husband). Of the 2340 deaths at the hands of intimate partners in the US in 2007, female victims made up 70%. FBI data from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s found that for every 100 husbands who killed their wives in the United States, about 75 women killed their husbands. However, wives were more likely to kill their husbands than vice versa in some US cities including Chicago, Detroit, Houston, and St. Louis. Uxoricide rates varied among different demographic subgroups.
“Uxoricide” enters the record as killing of one's wife. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Uxoricide, killing and one's can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1076426. The Library of Congress control number is sh85141656. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Uxoricide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.