hara-kiri: [19] Hara-kiri is a Japanese form of ritual suicide, now little practised, involving disembowelment. The term, which means literally ‘belly-cutting’, is a relatively colloquial one in Japanese; the more dignified expression is seppuku, literally ‘cut open the stomach’.
"suicide by disembowelment," 1856, from Japanese, literally "belly-cutting," the colloquial word for what is formally called seppuku "cut open the stomach;" from hara "belly" + kiri "to cut." Sometimes erroneously written hari-kari.
