1. Widespread and indiscriminate slaughter or massacre: Wars cost a vast amount of savagery, carnage, and suffering, especially of human beings.

Carnage can also relate to the serious injury to a great multitude of people, as in a major accident.

The slaughter of a great number of people, such as in battle, or the butchery or massacre or a huge number of people, causes carnage with resulting corpses, gore, etc.
2. Etymology: from Old French carnage, from Old Italian carnaggio, "slaughter, murder"; from Medieval Latin carnaticum, "flesh, meat", from Latin carnem or carn-, "flesh".