Learn English – Difference between “commit suicide” and “suicide”

differencesmeaningmeaning-in-contextword-choice

One of the examples in my English composition book (for learning to write my language's sentences in English) was "Why he committed suicide under such a good circumstance is an unsolved question.", but what I would have written would have been "Why he suicided…".

What's the difference between "commit suicide" and "suicide"? (I think I saw 'commit suicide' more than just 'suicide', and the spell checker of Google Chrome says that 'suicided' is not a word, even though I think it isn't wrong.)

Best Answer

There is no difference semantically. The only difference is that "suicide" as a verb is so rare I have never seen it before; whereas "commit suicide" is common. I would advise against unusual usages in general: You might confuse people, which is ill-advised, and in this case it is totally non-constructive to the language.