violence: a flagrant wrong done to another by force or injustice, especially when it sheds blood or crushes the helpless
This word names wrong of the worst kind: cruelty that injures people, takes what is theirs, or destroys their lives, done in open defiance of what is right. It is not abstract evil but harm with a victim. Most often it is physical, the violence of bloodshed, plunder, and oppression, but the same word reaches the courtroom, where a lying witness does a different kind of violence to an innocent person.
The word carries a strong moral charge. It is the thing that fills the earth and brings on the flood, the cry that rises from a city when the strong prey on the weak, the charge a sufferer flings at those who wrong him. Where it appears, someone is being harmed and a line is being crossed.
It keeps close company with bloodshed, ruin, and deceit, and the Bible regularly pairs it with a partner word for destruction or plunder. Its opposite is justice and peace, which is why the prophets promise a future where this violence is heard no more in the land.
The uses below are shades of this one idea rather than separate words. The plain physical sense, the shout that names it, the false witness in court, and the wrong charged or suffered all share the same core: a real person harmed by an act that ought never to have been done.