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 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 response to mass murder of populations in the 20th century, originally to that of the Armenians beginning in 1915 and later to the mass murders in Nazi controlled Europe. It has been applied to the Holocaust and many other mass killings, well-known examples including the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Bosnian Genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and, more recently, the Guatemalan genocide, the Kurdish genocide, and the Rwandan genocide.