Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word génos ("race, people") and the Latin suffix -cide ("act of killing"). The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".
The term genocide was coined in a 1944 book; it has been applied to the Holocaust and many other mass killings including the Armenian genocide, the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Guatemalan genocide, and, more recently, the Bosnian Genocide, the Kurdish genocide, and the Rwandan genocide.
Before 1944, various terms, including "massacre" and "crimes against humanity" were used to describe intentional, systematic killings, and in 1941, Winston Churchill, when describing the German invasion of the Soviet Union, spoke of "a crime without a name".