flense

• flench
• flinch

From Danish flense.

• IPA^(key): /flɛns/
• Rhymes: -ɛns

flense (third-person singular simple present flenses, present participle flensing, simple past and past participle flensed)

1. To strip the blubber or skin from, as from a whale, seal, etc.
   • 1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber 1992, p. 198:

     In this domain right sex is capital, it flenses the feelings of all the poisonous artifices brought in by the think-box in the guise of clever ideas.

   • 2001, Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, page 191 →ISBN:

     His eyes sprang open. Umegat stared straight at him for the fraction of a second, and Cazaril felt flensed.

   • 2004, Stephen R. Donaldson, The Runes of the Earth, page 5 →ISBN:

     For that reason, among others, he would never evince the particular guantness, the cut and flagrant sense of purpose - all compromise and capacity for surrender flensed away - which had made Thomas Covenant ir-refusable to her.

   • 2008, Ian C. Esselemont, Return of the Crimson Guard, page 569 →ISBN Invalid ISBN:

     It engulfed screaming soldiers who dissapeared before his eyes, their flesh, armor, even bone, flensed into a suspended mist that was heading straight for them.

   • 2011, Dominic Smith, Bright and Distant Shores, page 106:

     The Lemakot in the north strangled widows and threw them into the cremation pyres of their dead husbands. If they defeated potential invaders the New Irish hanged the vanquished from banyan trees, flensed their windpipes, removed their heads, left their intestines to jerk in the sun.

• flay, fleece, skin

flense

1. First-person singular present of flensen.
2. First-person singular subjunctive I of flensen.
3. Third-person singular subjunctive I of flensen.
4. Imperative singular of flensen.