> as lemmas

a. The deliberate and unlawful killing of a human being, esp. in a premeditated manner; (Law) criminal homicide with malice aforethought (occasionally more fully wilful murder); an instance of this.In Old English the word could be applied to any homicide that was strongly reprobated. It is therefore sometimes difficult, esp. in early use, to distinguish clearly between this sense and sense A. 1c. More strictly, however, it denoted secret murder, which in Germanic antiquity was alone regarded as a crime (in the modern sense), open homicide being considered a private wrong calling for blood-revenge or compensation. Even under Edward I, Britton explains the Anglo-Norman murdre only as felonious homicide in which both the perpetrator and the victim are not identified. The ‘malice aforethought’ which enters into the legal definition of murder, does not (as now interpreted) admit of any summary definition. Until the Homicide Act of 1957, a person might even be guilty of ‘wilful murder’ without intending the death of the victim, as when death resulted from an unlawful act which the doer knew to be likely to cause the death of someone, or from injuries inflicted to facilitate the commission of certain offences. By this act, ‘murder’ was extended to include death resulting from an intention to cause grievous bodily harm. It is essential to the legal definition of murder that the perpetrator be of sound mind, and (in England, though not in Scotland) that death should ensue within a year and a day after the act presumed to have caused it. In British law no degrees of guilt are recognized in murder; U.S. law distinguishes ‘murder in the first degree’ (or in the course of a crime, and without mitigating circumstances; cf. first degree n. 5) and ‘murder in the second degree’ (intentional but unpremeditated) though this distinction does not obtain in all U.S. states.