The word suicide is a seventeenth-century English invention put together from Latin elements and meaning literally "self-slaughter," and from English the word spread to other European languages. An isolated scholar around 1130 had in fact coined a Latin word suicida, but it had not gained currency, and that fact highlights the question why so ancient an act should have had to wait so long for a name.
One reason was taboo. People did not want to talk about suicide and, when they had to, used composite expressions like the medieval lawyers' "homicide (or felony) of oneself," or others, tinged with euphemism, like "to hasten death," "to die by one's own hand" (to quote from over a dozen expressions in classical Latin). A second reason, linke…
Condemnation of suicide, though widespread, has been far from universal. In all kinds of society, including preliterate kinds in Africa and America, communities with a suicide taboo can sometimes be found alongside others without. At least in more advanced cultures, two kinds of milieu have bred acceptance of suicide. One is military. In 1897 Émile Durkheim's classic, Suicide, recorded…
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