Today people are victims of injustice or fraud as well as car accidents and homicide.

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This is an improvement over victims of ages past that were restricted to having to have died to qualify as victims.

The word victim comes to English from Latin in the 15^th or almost the 16^th century. The earliest meaning in English was that victim was a sacrificial animal used in some pagan religious ceremony.

Back then any religious ceremony that wasn’t Christian was automatically considered suspect by English speakers. This would have been true of French speakers too who get involved in the word’s history as we’ll see in a moment.

As a Latin word victima naturally made its way into French as well but the Latin roots of the word mean that it evolved in a pre-Christian time and likely among people who thought these animal sacrifices were just the thing that God wanted; or gods, or something.

Most dictionaries don’t go this far back but the Century Dictionary suggests that the Latin victima was probably appled to sacrificial animals because when they were offered to the gods they would have been all prettied up, effectively wrapped in a bow.

The Latin word vincire meant “bind,” or “wind” as you would do with a ribbon and the Century Dictionary at any rate suspects this has the same etymological root as victim.

Though English adopted the word from Latin in a small way at first another influence on getting the word adopted into the language came about from French.

I’d never known it but in the latter 1500s in Reims, France there was an English college and it produced an English translation of the New Testament. I myself think of Reims as more of a source of champagne than of vocabulary but English bibles had an influence on English vocabulary and perhaps it was the French vocabulary of the New Testament translators that influenced their generous use of the word victim in the holy book.

In any case it wasn’t until 100 years later that the word became common and sometime after that when it started to soften in meaning so that death wasn’t always a prerequisite.