self-sacrifice

self- +‎ sacrifice

self-sacrifice (countable and uncountable, plural self-sacrifices)

1. The giving up of one's own benefit for the good of others.

   Synonyms: self-abnegation, self-denial

   Caring for a loved one with a chronic illness inevitably involves self-sacrifice.

   • 1886 May – 1887 April, Thomas Hardy, chapter 8, in The Woodlanders […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London, New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 165:

     Whatever he was suffering, it was she who had caused it; he had vacated his house on account of her. She was not worth such self-sacrifice; she should not have accepted it of him.

   • 1918, Willa Cather, My Ántonia‎, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 1, p. 292:

     Some of those boys came straight from the cornfields with only a summer’s wages in their pockets, hung on through the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really heroic self-sacrifice.

   • 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Turians: Culture Codex entry:

     Turians have a strong inclination towards public service and self-sacrifice, so they tend to be poor entrepreneurs.

   • 2012, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, chapter 15, in In the House of the Interpreter‎, New York: Anchor Books, published 2015, pages 43–44:

     […] he turned his resourceful mind away from the serene life of a don on grass lawns in Cambridge to one of self-sacrifice and pure devotion in the thorny bushes of Africa.

2. The act of making the ultimate sacrifice of giving up one's life for a cause.

   His brave self-sacrifice won him a posthumous medal, but I think he'd have preferred to receive it in person.

   • 1951, Graham Greene, The End of the Affair‎, New York: Pocket Books, Book 5, Chapter 6, p. 215:

     [Scott’s Last Expedition] had been one of my own favourite books. It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own.

   • 2022 January 12, Benedict le Vay, “The heroes of Soham...”, in RAIL, number 948, page 42:

     However, something once happened on the railway there which showed the very best of mankind: heroism, duty, self-sacrifice and calm professionalism under terrible pressure. It is a story which gives us far, far better reasons for remembering this attractive little town, which without these heroes would have been blown to smithereens in a gigantic explosion. (Two railwaymen lost their lives in 1944 when a wagon in an ammunition train caught fire and blew up, an even worse disaster was averted however.)