Besides the ten words listed here that have all since slipped into more general use, the English language contains a number of much more unusual words for different methods of punishment and execution that are seldom encountered outside of historical contexts. For instance, as well as DECIMATION, in Ancient Rome fustuarium was the name of a military punishment reserved only for deserters of the Roman Army or for soldiers found guilty of dereliction of duty, who were flogged or cudgelled to death; in the Persian Empire, scaphismus was the name of a gruesome punishment in which the victim would be sealed between two log boats so that only his head and limbs were free, and then tormented with stinging and flesh-eating insects; and in the sixth century BC, the tyrannical Phalaris of Sicily was so famous for his cruelty – he introduced the ‘brazen bull’ as a method of execution, and even executed its inventor in it in order to test it out – that the term Phalarism came to be used in the sixteenth century to refer to any inhuman cruelty or torture.
Derived from a Latin word, decimatio, literally meaning ‘to remove one-tenth’, historically decimation was a punishment meted out on mutinous or cowardly troops in the Roman Army in which men were rounded up into groups of ten, with lots drawn amongst each group to select one man who was then promptly put to death by his nine cohorts. A comparable punishment, vigesimation, saw one in every twenty men killed, whilst in centesimation it was one in every hundred. Today, decimation is typically used in a much more general manner to mean simply ‘destruction’ or ‘devastation’, particularly of a large portion of something, but this less specific use of the word is often frowned upon by critics and more fussy speakers of English.
In modern English, the word defenestration is occasionally used in a figurative sense to refer to the removal of an individual or individuals from a high-ranking office. Strictly speaking, however, to defenestrate literally means to ‘throw something or someone out of a window’, and is ultimately derived from the Latin word for ‘window’, fenestra. This somewhat unusual term has its origins in the so-called Defenestration of Prague in 1618, in which two Catholic Lord Regents and one of their assistants were thrown from the third-floor window of Prague Castle by a group of Protestant noblemen, who were enraged at what they saw as the removal of various religious freedoms in Bohemia.
In maritime history, keelhauling was an extraordinarily brutal method of punishment administered on board ships in which the victim was tied to a rope that looped around the entire vessel, then thrown overboard and dragged either along or around the keel of the ship. Often the victim would drown or even be decapitated in the process, but if he did survive, the rough barnacle-covered base of the ship would nonetheless inflict terrible injuries. In this literal sense, keelhaul first appeared in the language in the mid-seventeenth century, but in modern English it tends only to be used in a metaphorical sense meaning ‘reprimand severely’.
In Ancient Greece, the process of ostracism was a democratic procedure in which the people of Athens could vote to have one of the city’s inhabitants banished for a period of ten years. The term derives from the Greek word ostrakon, meaning a ‘tile’ or ‘piece of pottery’, on which the name of the person in question would have been written; the unfortunate person whose name appeared the most would ultimately be expelled from the city. The modern use of the word, in the sense of shunning or excluding someone from a group, dates from the late 1600s.
Used to mean simply to ‘deride’ or to ‘humiliate’ since the seventeenth century in English, the pillory was originally an instrument of punishment and humiliation dating from medieval times, in which the victim was made to place his head and hands through holes in a wooden board, which was then locked shut, holding him in place, uncomfortably stooped over. Often erected in some communal location like a marketplace or crossroads, the pillory was usually placed on a raised platform to make the victim’s punishment as public and as humiliating as possible, and leaving him open to the physical and verbal abuse of the people nearby. It was abolished as a form of punishment in Britain in 1837.
As another word for a lecherous or debauched man, roué has been used since the late eighteenth century in English. It is a derivative of the French verb rouer which, although essentially meaning ‘to beat up’ in modern French, historically meant ‘to break on a wheel’, referring to an ancient European method of capital punishment dating from the Middle Ages in which a victim would be strapped across the spokes of a huge wooden wheel and bludgeoned to death. Apparently such a punishment was once considered appropriate for someone exhibiting lecherous or lewd behaviour.
Use of the word send-up to mean a satirical spoof or mockery of something is believed to have developed from English public-school slang, wherein send-up originally meant to be sent to the headmaster either for a reward or, more typically, for punishment. In this context, the word dates from the early nineteenth century – it appears in the works of authors including William Makepeace Thackeray and Thomas Hughes, in his Tom Brown’s School Days – and remains in use at certain English public schools today.
Often applied metaphorically to any uncomfortably warm and enclosed environment – and in the 1970s to an unusual piece of weight-loss equipment – the earliest recorded use of the word sweatbox in English dates from the mid-nineteenth century. It described a narrow cell, used especially in arid desert regions, into which a prisoner was placed in solitary confinement as a punishment. The extreme heat and dry conditions outside the cell would cause temperatures inside to rise to dangerously high levels, making it extremely unpleasant and potentially fatal for the detainee. In this context, the term probably originated during the American Civil War.
The word swelter has been used since the fifteenth century in English to mean simply to ‘suffer the heat’, ‘languish’ or ‘sweat’. It is derived from an earlier Old English word, swelt, which meant to ‘die’ or ‘be overcome’, but both words are ultimately related to an Old Norse word, svelta, which meant ‘to be put or starved to death’, which is still found in this sense in Icelandic today.
Use of the word treadmill as a piece of exercise equipment dates from the 1950s, but the word itself was coined much earlier than that by the English inventor Sir William Cubitt, a Norfolk-born millwright and a former President of the Institute of Engineers. Cubitt’s treadmill comprised a large cylinder, with a number of boards or steps around its edge, which could be made to turn by a person or group of people treading on the steps. Although the contraption had a wider industrial application in easing laborious tasks like raising water or grinding grain or rocks, the device was nevertheless put to use as a punishment in nineteenth-century prisons, wherein inmates were made to trudge away on the mill for hours at a time. Having been imprisoned for gross indecency in 1895, Oscar Wilde recounted being made to work the treadmill in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: ‘We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns / And sweated on the mill, / But in the heart of every man / Terror was lying still.’