The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cat o' nine tails \Cat" o' nine" tails`\, cat-o'-nine-tails \cat"-o'-nine"-tails`\n. 1. a whip used as an instrument of punishment consisting of nine pieces of knotted line or cord fastened to a handle; -- formerly used to flog offenders on the bare back; -- called also the cat. It was used in the British Navy to maintain discipline on board sailing ships.
Syn: cat.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1690s, probably so called in reference to its "claws." It was a legal instrument of punishment in British Navy until 1881.
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context nautical English) A whip having nine, often knotted, whipcords, formerly used for flogging as naval punishment. (from late 17th c.) 2 A similarly constructed leather nine-tail whip, as used in British penal colonies and certain armies.
WordNet
n. a whip with nine knotted cords; "British sailors feared the cat" [syn: cat]
Usage examples of "cat-o'-nine-tails".
He had never known an ache or a pain in his life save those inflicted by some boatswain's mate with a cat-o'-nine-tails.
Men hi chest-high waders wandered up and down the two-foot-deep waters excitedly flailing the currents, using their fishing rods like cat-o'-nine-tails to create a froth, splashing, chattering loudly to each other, throwing stones, casting across each other's lines, and yet somehow, probably because the fish were so confused, they caught the hatchery trout.
He was in the library one day, reading files of an early Honolulu newspaper, the Polynesian, for he wished to refresh his mind as to what that journal's excitable editor, James Jackson Jarves, had actually said about missionaries, and for a while he got bogged down in the story of how Jarves had protested when a French warship roared into Honolulu, insisting that French wines be imported in unlimited amounts, and of how the French authorities threatened to lash him through the streets with a cat-o'-nine-tails.
Then he began showing them various curios from the slave trade, advertisements, pictures of slave ships, of slaves in steerage, of the auction block, an iron bar used as currency in buying slaves, a whip made of rhinoceros hide used by the Africans to drive the slaves to the coast, a branding silver, a cat-o'-nine-tails used on the slaves aboard ship, a pincers to pull teeth -- to what purpose they couldn't tell.
The tremendous force of a single blow from the cat-o'-nine-tails was enough to drive the wind from the lungs and left little to cry on.
The sight of a bos'n's mate sitting on deck methodically making a cat-o'-nine-tails, carefully splicing the nine thin tails into the thick rope handle, and probably covering the splice with a Turk's head, had a fascination for the men, who always knew the man who was to be flogged.