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"Mass killing" definitions from reliable sources
Ervin Staub defined mass killing as "killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group membership."

Benjamin Valentino defined mass killing as "the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants", with a massive number defined as at least 50,000 killed within five years. This is the most accepted quantitative minimum threshold for the term. He also acknowledges that there are "mass killings on a smaller scale".

William Easterly, Roberta Gatti and Sergio Kurlat adopted Israel Charny's definition of generic genocide for their use of mass killing and massacre to avoid the politics of the term genocide. In the Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999), Israel Charny had defined generic genocide as "the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims." Joan Esteban, Massimo Morelli and Dominic Rohner used the same language in their definition of mass killings.

Chyanda M. Querido has defined mass killing as "the intentional killing of 1,000 or more people (noncombatants), members of any kind of group (religious, political, racial, ethnic, etc), by state governments in the context of an intrastate conflict."

"Mass murder" definitions from reliable sources
Ronald M. Holmes and and Stephen T. Holmes have defined mass murder as a form of "multicide" (along with serial murder and spree murder) in which at least three people are killed, but require a definition to account for four variables: the number of victims, location, time, and distance between murder sites. They cite previous studies defining the term with either a three (Holmes and Deburger, 1985, 1988; Hickey, 1991) or four (Hazelwood & Douglas, 1980) victim minimum. They cite another definition of mass murder (Dietz, 1986) as "the willful injuring of five or more persons of whom three or more are killed by a single offender in a single incident."

In the early 1980s, the FBI established a "trichotomy of multiple murder" as part of an initiative to study repeat killers. Murders were categorized as "single", "double", "triple", "mass" for at least four murdered, "spree" for at least two victims in at least two locations with no cooling off period, and "serial" for at least three victims in at least three separate events in at least three different locations with cooling off periods between them. Prior to this, all forms of multiple murder were considered mass killing and the terms "serial" or "spree" were used only in a descriptive sense. According to an FBI report, while developing a consensus definition for serial murder, attendees at the Serial Murder Symposium in 2005 generally described mass murder as four or more murders occurring as part of the same incident, with no distinctive time period between them, and typically at a single location.

According to R. J. Rummel, "although usage varies, both [mass murder and massacre] usually mean the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people by government agents". As part of his definition of democide, he defines mass murder as "the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government."

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