What is "knouts"

Usage examples of "knouts".

They must be guided to that decision, to that cause, not with fists and knouts, but with words.

And from this back uprose and fell immense spiked and fan-shaped ruffs, thickets of spikes, whipping knouts of bristling tentacles, fanged crests.

There have been Cossacks in every age and we are not the only ones who have felt their knouts and swords as they rode into the village with murder in their hearts.

The peasant drivers, shouting at their horses and lashing them with their knouts, ran from one side to the other.