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Knout   Listen
Knout

noun
1.
A whip with a lash of leather thongs twisted with wire; used for flogging prisoners.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Knout" Quotes from Famous Books



... myself! The Skipper says that he's heard that the persecution of the Jews has just begun again. Cruel shame, but I daren't say this aloud, in case anyone should understand just that amount of English, and then—whoopski!—the knout and Siberia! So I'll say "nowt." Really humorous that, I'm sure, and 19,000 miles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various

... cried a rough voice near by, and the next instant the burly form of a keeper stood between them. "Nineteen, you have already made trouble enough. You must have the knout," and unlocking the door of his cell, he seized him by the hair of the head and dragged him out and down ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold

... getting too saucy since you ceased to be serfs, and the knout is the best school for you to learn ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde

... justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory Nazianzen. Are we, then, angry on behalf of Julian? So far as he was interested, not for a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every "raw" that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the claims of the criminal, was not right as regarded the duties ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action—it's awful in Nekrassov. But that's only a horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it. But men, too, can be beaten. A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. 'It stings more,' said he, and so he began ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... and detraction Ridicule, than which no weapon is more false or deadly Salique Laws Thank Heaven, I am out of harness Traducing virtues the slanderers never possessed Underrated what she could not imitate Where the knout ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger

... Rochefoucauld. A hermit he was during the dozen hours a day he toiled, but he was a sociable man, nevertheless, a cultured man fond of music, possessing a tongue that was feared as much as is the Russian knout. Mr. Moore has printed many specimens of his caustic wit. Whistler actually kept silent in his presence—possibly expecting a repetition of the mot: "My dear friend, you conduct yourself in life just as if you had no talent ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... The knout that flogged his soul had a score of lashes, each with the sting of its own peculiar venom. Everybody who knew him, his closer friends, and his casual acquaintances as well, must have known, for weeks, of this disgrace. His friends had been sorry for him, with just a grain ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... out a box of pies, wine, and sweets for themselves. The ladies wrapped up in their white dogskins. The drivers disputed as to whose troyka should go ahead, and the youngest, seating himself sideways with a dashing air, swung his long knout and shouted to the horses. The troyka-bells tinkled and the sledge-runners ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy

... perhaps some part of Russia, Siberia, or the Caucasus—but my world they none of them believed in. It didn't exist they said. It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the knout, and when those went Russia would go too. As I grew up some of them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join their clubs and societies. But those were no use to me. They couldn't ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... and was much talked of. This, by the way, is the only reference which occurs in the Memoirs to any interest below that of the highest nobility. As for the people of Russia, the right to draw their blood with the knout and make them sweat roubles into the royal treasury was taken as much for granted as the light and the air, by those who, either through fraud or force, could sit in the seat of Peter the Great. They regarded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... this unending calm was understandable: Gregor was always ready to die. What to do with a man to whom death was release? To hold the knout and to see it turn to water in the hand! In lying he had overreached. Gregor, having accepted as fact the reported death of Ivan, had nothing to live for. Having brought Gregor here to torture he had, blind fool, taken away the fiddler's ability to feel. The fog cleared. He himself had ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... tyrant, who has the right to-day to scourge them with whips, to-morrow to make them barons and counts, and perhaps the next day to send them to Siberia, or subject them to the infliction of the fatal knout. Whoever proclaims himself emperor or dictator, is greeted by the Russian people, that horde of creeping slaves, as their lord and master, the supreme disposer of life and death, while they crawl in the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... rod, cane, stick; ratan[obs3], rattan; birch, birch rod; azote[obs3], blacksnake[obs3], bullwhack [obs3][U.S.], chicote[obs3], kurbash[obs3], quirt, rawhide, sjambok[obs3]; rod in pickle; switch, ferule, cudgel, truncheon. whip, bullwhip, lash, strap, thong, cowhide, knout; cat, cat o'nine tails; rope's end. pillory, stocks, whipping post; cucking stool[obs3], ducking stool; brank[obs3]; trebuchet[obs3], trebuket[obs3]. triangle[instruments of torture: list], wooden horse, iron maiden, thumbscrew, boot, rack, wheel, iron heel; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... She had to implore the mediation of the patriarch. Chaklovity was first put to the torture and made to confess his plot against the Czar, and then decapitated. Medviedef was at first only condemned to the knout and banishment for heresy, but he acknowledged he had intended to take the place of the patriarch and to marry Sophia; he was dishonored by being imprisoned with two sorcerers, condemned to be burned alive in a cage, and was afterward beheaded. Galitsyne ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson



Words linked to "Knout" :   whip



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