Genocide is the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. A term coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the hybrid word geno-cide is a combination of the Greek word γένος (genos, "race, people") and the Latin suffix -caedo ("act of killing"). The word genocide has also come to signify a value judgment as it is widely considered the epitome of human evil.