The less bloody, but more common, sense of vendetta names an often prolonged series of retaliatory, vengeful, or hostile acts (or exchanges of such acts). Its earlier sense, which first appeared in English in 1855, was as a synonym for blood feud, which refers to a feud between the members of different clans or families arising out of a crime of violence (such as a killing) committed by a member of one family upon a member of another and requiring a continuing series of alternative retaliations in kind.

The word vendetta comes from Italian, where it literally means "revenge" and originally named such blood feuds in Corsica and Italy. The Latin ancestor of vendetta is vindicta, which meant "revenge" and also gave English the words vengeance, vindictive, and vindicate.

Of course, Mediterranean cultures aren't the only places for such blood feuds. In Anglo-Saxon and Germanic law, wergild (literally, "man payment") was assessed on a person wrongfully killed. If a payment wasn't made (or was refused), blood feuds could ensue.