If a crowd lynches someone, they kill that person themselves — often by hanging — with no court and no judge. The word is heavy. In the United States it is tied to a long history of white crowds murdering Black people, and that pain still sits in the word. It is not a casual verb. Though actually, some people now stretch it to mean a fierce public attack online, with no killing at all; many others say that stretch is too loose, because the real word is about a mob taking a life. The name comes from “Lynch law” in the early 1800s, probably from a man named Lynch — scholars do not all agree which Lynch. A family name Lynch is a separate everyday fact: many people are simply called Lynch, and that does not mean violence.