French invention originally called a louisette

Usage examples of guillotine.

Dominici has been condemned: descending from the charming empyrean of bourgeois novels and essentialist psychology, Literature has just condemned a man to the guillotine.

Maxwell, whose skill called forth the praises of the poet, had the honour of being named by Burke in the House of Commons: he shared in the French revolution, and narrowly escaped the guillotine, like many other true friends of liberty.

Finishing his whirl with a dive, The Shadow cleared the basket and shot headlong between the uprights of the guillotine while the mighty ax was sizzing down those very rods!

A search party of tracking dogs hunted him down and he was executed on the fifth of April in the place du Pilori, the first of those to be guillotined at Caen.

Despite competition from traps that guillotine, harpoon, incinerate, and tranquillize, the standard old wood-base snap trap is still considered the most reliable.

Five and thirty livres for every head that falls trunkless into the basket at the foot of the guillotine!

Monday, September 13th, 1943, at 1 PM, the death sentence against former Unteroffizier Christian Himmel, born September 12th, 1922, in Ottobeuren, Bayern, Religion Catholic, will be executed with the guillotine in your prison.

Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution.

I had a mental image of myself as Andrea Chenier, in his tumbrel, rattling along the cobbled streets of Paris on his way to the guillotine.

You have hung in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted at Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Paris, but there is one thing you cannot destroy: Anarchism.

For example, if we assume that Meursault will be spared the guillotine, how might we alter our view of him and of society, and thus our understanding of the novel?

Then he speaks, in another access of seriocomic hyperbole, of the death of Countess Du Barry on the guillotine.

At Lyon, where the guillotine was thought too slow a means of dispensing with antirevolutionaries, hundreds were mown down by cannon fire.

Thou givest to the Guilty their calm mien Which damns the crowd around the guillotine.

A great mistake, a very great mistake, for at once a blinding, agonising pain, that never-recorded pain that must be experienced in the final shattering millisecond of awareness as a plunging guillotine slices through bone, flesh, and muscle before crashing into the block beneath, slashed its paralysing way across head, neck, and shoulders and toppled me back to the deck again.