The word 'victim' entered English in the late 15th century from Latin victima, meaning a living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to a deity or in a religious rite. The Latin term is of uncertain deeper origin, though it may be related to the Proto-Indo-European root weik-, meaning "to separate" or "to consecrate," a concept central to sacrificial rituals. The original sense was strictly religious, referring to the sacrificial animal. Over centuries, the meaning broadened metaphorically, first to a person killed for religious or political reasons, and then generalized to any being who suffers harm or death from any hostile or unfortunate circumstance. This evolution traces a path from a specific ritual object to a universal concept of one who suffers.

The word 'victim' is a simplex loanword from Latin. It does not contain separable, productive morphemes in modern English spelling.