The Collaborative International Dictionary
Noyade \No`yade"\, n. [F., fr. noyer to drown, L. necare to kill.] A drowning of many persons at once, -- a method of execution practiced at Nantes in France during the Reign of Terror, by Jean Baptiste Carrier.
Wiktionary
n. (context chiefly historical English) A murder by drowning; especially, one of those carried out during the French http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign%20of%20Terror.
Usage examples of "noyade".
And the Noyades were the work of a lunatic, who paid the price with his own life when his crimes were revealed.
Richard, of their climax in 1961, the Nuit des Noyades when some scores of dark-skinned folk had been tipped into the Seine.
He it was who instigated the massacres of September, the atrocities of Nantes, the horrors of Thermidor, the sacrileges, the noyades: all with the view of causing every section of the National Assembly to vie with the other in excesses and in cruelty, until the makers of the Revolution, satiated with their own lust, turned on one another, and Sardanapalus-like buried themselves and their orgies in the vast hecatomb of a self-consumed anarchy.