knout

Via French, from Russian кнут (knut),from Old East Slavic кнутъ (knutŭ), from Old Norse knútr (“knot in a cord”).

• IPA^(key): /naʊt/

knout (plural knouts)

1. A leather scourge (multi-tail whip), in the severe version known as 'great knout' with metal weights on each tongue, notoriously used in imperial Russia.
   • 1832 October 27, Winthrop Mackworth Praed; Derwent Coleridge, “Tales out of School. A Dropt Letter from a Lady.”, in The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, […]. In Two Volumes, volume II, 4th edition, London: E[dward] Moxon, Son & Co., […], published 1874, OCLC 894138547, page 217:

     In Moscow, a Court carbonadoes / His ignorant serfs with the knout; / […] / But Eton has crueller terrors / Than these,—in the Windsor Express.

   • 1848, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Chapter 5:

     Torture in a public school is as much licensed as the knout in Russia.

   • 1980: Spray and then slogging knouts of water hit the windows or lights like snarling disaffected at a mansion of the rich and frivolous. — Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
   • 2005: The lieutenant gave him twenty strokes of the knout and stuck him in a cage for a few days till the snow was ankle deep. — James Meek, The People's Act of Love (Canongate 2006, p. 193)

knout (third-person singular simple present knouts, present participle knouting, simple past and past participle knouted)

1. To flog or beat with a knout.
   • 1992, Will Self, Cock and Bull:

     Different, isn’t it? It’s called kava, by the way. The Fijians make it by knouting some root or other.

• (to whip or scourge): Thesaurus:whip

From Russian кнут (knut), from Old East Slavic кнутъ (knutŭ), from Old Norse knútr (“knot”)

• IPA^(key): /knut/

• Audio (Paris)

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knout m (plural knouts)

1. knout, scourge
2. a flogging administered with such a multiple whip; a condemnation to suffer it

• → English: knout

• “knout” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).