Excoriate

Usage examples of flay.

If her skin was flayed off her, Astyanax would never look at her again!

He had the bluest eyes Cody had ever seen, a ready sense of humor, and the ability to flay a student naked with a casual, sometimes off-hand comment.

All along the sides of the road fallen horses were to be seen, some flayed, some not, and broken-down carts beside which solitary soldiers sat waiting for something, and again soldiers straggling from their companies, crowds of whom set off to the neighboring villages, or returned from them dragging sheep, fowls, hay, and bulging sacks.

Just behind all these Cammerling saw ranks of archers advancing with fire-headed missiles on their bows, and the whole mass was being urged on by horn-blowers, cymbalists and bull-roarers and standard-bearers staggering under huge pennants realistically resembling entire flayed human hides.

The most immediately striking is Tom Coyle, an acerbic Glaswegian with a tongue that can flay the arrogance off a graduate with an alarming, inventive but always scatological turn of phrase.

But be warned, Goran, if there is no city I shall take off my belt and flay your buttocks till they bleed!

The Hadendowa woman could castrate a man, then flay every inch of skin from his body without allowing him to lose consciousness, forcing him to endure every exquisite cut of the blade.

A man screamed as the barrel pinned him against the broken gun-carriage and as limewash flayed at his eyes.

There was more to consider: for I was not averse to the possibility of gaining revenge upon the necrophile witch for my sakes, those of Lance Medlar and his ill-starred parents, of Kostos and of a woman whose name I shall never know, but whose methodically flayed and preserved body I shall always remember.

She was wearing green scrubs, and sandals, her hair plaited in a single loose cable all flayed with sprung wisps.

The conscripts, under experienced sergeants, would flay the walls left and right of the assault with musket fire.

The sounds, the shocks, the flares of lurid light on the horizon were so enormous, that reason was stripped from humanity, leaving nothing but flayed animals to shriek, cower, and run.

The fire flayed at the enemy, flensing men off the front and flanks of the column, so that it seemed as if the enemy marched into an invisible mincing machine.

Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

Sure enough, they showed he was bringing in flayed human skin substitute produced by the law of similarity, as certified by some high sorcerer down in Tenochtitlan, the point of origin of the stuff.