perdricide

English

Etymology

From French perdrix (“partridge”) + -cide.

Pronunciation

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

Noun

perdricide (countable and uncountable, plural perdricides)

1. (obsolete) Someone who kills partridges.
   • 1826 September, Thomas Edwards, “A Letter to the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Surrey, on the Misconduct of Licensing Magistrates, and the consequent Degradation of the Magistracy”, in The Edinburgh Review, volume 44, page 442:

     What the poor shall drink—how they shall drink it […] all these great questions depend upon little clumps of squires and parsons gathered together in alehouses in the month of September—so portentous to publicans and partridges, to sots and sportsmen, to guzzling and game.
     "I am by no means a friend to the multiplication of public-houses," says a plump perdricide gentleman in loose mud-coloured gaiters, bottle-green jacket and brass buttons. Perhaps not; but you are a friend to the multiplication of inns.

2. (obsolete) The killing of partridges.
   • 1849, “Sanitary Reform”, in The British Quarterly Review, volume 9, page 50:

     Ashes form the most valuable description of dust […] for the right to remove them, dust-contractors pay considerable sums to the parishes […] The abstracting of ashes is viewed by a dust-contractor as perdricide by a rural squire, and, to say the least of it, with quite as much reason.