Crossword clues for impalement
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Empalement \Em*pale"ment\, n. [Cf. F. empalement, fr. empaler. See Empale.] [Written also impalement.]
A fencing, inclosing, or fortifying with stakes.
A putting to death by thrusting a sharpened stake through the body.
(Her.) Same as Impalement.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1590s, from French empalement, from empaler (see impale).
Wiktionary
n. 1 The act of torturing or executing someone by impaling them on a sharp stake. 2 The joining of two coat of arms on one shield.
WordNet
n. the act of piercing with a sharpened stake as a form of punishment or torture
Wikipedia
Impalement, as a method of execution, is the penetration of a human by an object such as a stake, pole, spear, or hook, often by complete or partial perforation of the torso. It was used particularly in response to "crimes against the state" and regarded across a number of cultures as a very harsh form of capital punishment and recorded in myth and art. Impalement was also used during wartime to suppress rebellion, punish traitors or collaborators, and as a punishment for breaches of military discipline.
Offenses where impalement was occasionally employed include: contempt for the state's responsibility for safe roads and trade routes by committing highway robbery or grave robbery, violating state policies or monopolies, or subverting standards for trade. Offenders have also been impaled for a variety of cultural, sexual and religious reasons.
References to impalement in Babylonia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire are found as early as the 18th century BC. Within the Ottoman Empire, this form of execution continued into the 20th century.
In heraldry, impalement is a form of heraldic combination or marshalling of two coats of arms side by side in one divided heraldic shield or escutcheon to denote a union, most often that of a husband and wife (and in certain cases, same-sex married couples), but also for unions of ecclesiastical, academic/civic and mystical natures. An impaled shield is bisected "in pale", that is by a vertical line.
Usage examples of "impalement".
It touches the question of dimidiation or impalement in the coat of mine uncle, Sir John Leighton of Shropshire, who took unto wife the widow of Sir Henry Oglander of Nunwell.
Multiple rape followed by disembowelment or impalement was far more common than was enslavement for women and little girls, while in the cases of men and boys, an amusing session of savage tortures and deliberate maimings which invariably included castration was most often followed by slowly roasting them alive, although if the horde happened to be in a hurry, they might cut leg and arm tendons, pull out tongues, gouge or burn out eyes, and just leave the bloody, blind, croaking, flopping sufferer to bleed to death.
After the great public fetes, receptions, acclamations, and parades which marked his return to Rome, when he and his nobles all had been heaped with honors and blessings, thanked and praised to the very skies by everyone except the prisoners in the dungeons, sat in attendance at torturings, maimings, burnings, impalements, and more inventive or novel executions of more prominent officers of the defeated faction, then he saw his few remaining thousands mounted and began the march back north, moving as fast as he could without unnecessarily tiring marching men or horses and without giving needless offense to those along the way set upon expressing their gratitude of his aid against and final victories over the oppressors.
The chief brahmin rose, and having delivered an extemporaneous prayer, suitable to the solemnity and importance of the occasion, he proceeded to read the will of the late king —he then descanted upon the Molean controversy, and how it was now an article of the Souffrarian faith, which it was heresy and impalement not to believe, that "moles were not scars, and only blemishes when they were considered so to be.
One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate—meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.
One gets the impression that since the beginning of time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate -- meanwhile suffering by the way various inevitable tortures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements, crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet.
Prolonged and hideous tortures awaited her, culminating in her public impalement, nude, upon the walls of the great kasbah at Nine Wells.
No longer would you be entitled to certain forms of torture, suitable for free persons, culminating in your honorable impalement.
The book’s author lingered lovingly over impalements and flayings and tortures visited on a generation unlucky enough to have lived when the Free Companies of Khatovar marched out of that strange corner of the world that spawned them.
The impalements were hard and managed to hit the most sensitive spot within her quivering vagina every time without fail.
Thrusting her hips back at him, she gloried in the sound of his groans as she met each of his impalements with an equally lusty thrust.
The myriad impalements of his face made his expression particularly grotesque.
As the liche struck, he threw himself sideways—a move Martis would have thought impossible, and wound up avoiding impalement by inches.
Fantasizing about impalement, flaying, and disembowlment while he sat in a hovel with nothing to pick on but flies.