phrase requests - Word for killing off or attempting to kill off an entire bloodline?


I would like to know if there is a word or phrase for a systematic campaign to annihilate every descendant of a particular ancestor.


We have the word 'genocide' for killing off an entire race, and plenty of words for killing people based on how they are related to you (fratricide, filicide, et. al.), but looking over the "cide" words on The Phrontistery and the List of types of killing on Wikipedia, I couldn't find a term for systematically killing an entire bloodline.


My question is prompted by a US news story about the horrific murder of 8 members of the same family, but those murders are not an example of what I'm thinking of because the children of the victims were left alive, so the motive for the killings was not to kill off the bloodline. The sense that some group had coordinated an attack against just one family is what made me wonder what the "not an entire race, just one bloodline" version of 'genocide' would be called.


Searching the Internet for "kill off" and bloodline sends me straight into the land of vampires, Illuminati, reptilian overlords, and, naturally, Priory of Sion nonsense so I haven't had much luck finding a thread to pull.


It may be that there is no word for it in the sense of murdering a human bloodline, because we just don't attempt kill off our royals down to the last heir often enough to coin a term for it. Maybe there is a scientific term for culling a line from a test population as part of biological research?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

phrases - Somebody is gonna kiss the donkey

typography - When a dagger is used to indicate a note, must it come after an asterisk?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"