Overkill is the use of excessive force or action that goes further than what is necessary to achieve its goal. It may be a literal term referring to physical damage, though it is also used in colloquial conversation as a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...

Nuclear weapons

''Overkill'' is especially used to refer to a destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an enemy.http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/overkill>. The term is attested from 1946"overkill." Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 31 March. 2009. . and was in common use during the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

era, referring to the

arms race An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority. It consists of a competition between two or more State (polity), states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and ...

between the United States and the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. Both nations possess more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy one another many times over – nuclear overkill. The term for this was "pounding the rubble" or, as military officers sometimes joked, "pounding the ruble". Overkill colloquially refers either to use of force or weapons or to satiate the desire to humiliate a rival. In Spanish, "overkill" is referred to as "matanza excesiva".

In video games

Overkill is a common feature implemented in many

video games A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

, typically representing the fact that the damage a single attack inflicted on an enemy or player character far exceeded the character's remaining health points. In many

first-person shooter A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre, video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a First person (video games), first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through t ...

s, starting with '' Doom'', overkilling a character results in " gibbing" – the character exploding in a shower of gore.

Notes

Slang Violence 1940s neologisms English words {{English-lang-stub