Parricide is the crime of killing your own father or mother, or another close relative. It is murder, but this word puts a special weight on the family tie: the dead person was not a stranger, and that is the whole point of the name. English also has narrower words that students mix with this one. Patricide is killing your father only. Matricide is killing your mother only. Parricide is the wider, older word, and in careful use it can cover a parent, a grandparent, or another close relation. You will not hear it on the bus. It belongs to law, history, old plays, and serious news. It feels formal, cold, and heavy. People almost never joke with it, because the idea itself is already as dark as a family word can get. Though actually, different writers do not always draw the circle in the same place: some use parricide as if it meant only a parent, and some keep the wider “close relative” sense. The tidy school sentence says “killing a parent”; real pages are a little messier, but they still all mean killing someone who should have been safe with you.

弒親