Why this word is great
BLOODWEALTH — [Noun] Compensation, typically in the form of livestock or goods, paid by the kin of a perpetrator to the kin of the victim in traditional societies, to avert a cycle of vengeance. From the English words blood, referring to the life taken, and wealth, referring to the property or goods used as payment. Unlike weregild (which denotes a fixed, often monetary, valuation in codified Germanic law) or revenge (which seeks a punitive symmetry of suffering), bloodwealth is a pragmatic, tragic algebra of social continuity. It is the formal procession of herds across a border, the heavy transfer of brass rings and tooled leather, the palpable silence in which grief is measured out in tangible goods—a ledger of loss that seeks to balance an unbalanceable account, proving that even a life can have a price, so that more lives need not be spent.