Electrocution is death or severe injury  caused by electric shock from electric current passing through the body. The word is derived from "electro" and "execution", but it is also used for accidental death.The term "electrocution" was coined in 1889 in the US just before the first use of the electric chair and originally referred to only electrical execution and not other electrical deaths. However, since no English word was available for non-judicial deaths due to electric shock, the word "electrocution" eventually took over as a description of all circumstances of electrical death from the new commercial electricity. Origins
In the Netherlands in 1746 Pieter van Musschenbroeks lab assistant, Andreas Cuneus, received an extreme shock while working with a leyden jar, the first recorded injury from man-made electricity. By the mid-19th century high-voltage electrical systems came into use to power arc lighting for theatrical stage lighting and lighthouses leading to the first recorded accidental death in 1879 when a stage carpenter in Lyon, France, touched a 250-volt wire.The spread of arc light–based street lighting systems (which at the time ran at a voltage above 3,000 volts) after 1880 led to many people dying from coming in contact with these high-voltage lines, a strange new phenomenon which seemed to kill instantaneously without leaving a mark on the victim. This would lead to execution by electricity in the electric chair in the early 1890s as an official method of capital punishment in the U.S. state of New York, thought to be a more humane alternative to hanging.
Executioners Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-37572-446-6.