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Knout   Listen
noun
Knout  n.  A kind of whip for flogging criminals, formerly much used in Russia. The lash is a tapering bundle of leather thongs twisted with wire and hardened, so that it mangles the flesh.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Knout" Quotes from Famous Books



... sprang to his saddle, and cried a retreat. The Cossacks, unable to turn in the aisle, backed cumbrously with a manifold thudding and rearing and clanking, but ere the congregation had finished rubbing their eyes, the last conical hat and leaded knout had vanished, and only the tarry reek of their boots was left in proof of their actual passage. A deep silence hung for a moment like a heavy cloud, then it broke in a torrent ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... with the soldiers and common people, among whom it made a sensation and was much talked of. This, by the way, is the only reference which occurs in the Memoirs to any interest below that of the highest nobility. As for the people of Russia, the right to draw their blood with the knout and make them sweat roubles into the royal treasury was taken as much for granted as the light and the air, by those who, either through fraud or force, could sit in the seat of Peter the Great. They regarded it as no less an appanage or perquisite of that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... with souls to dare, From huts and ruined halls! On the deep midnight of despair A beam of ancient glory falls: The knout, the chain and dungeon cave To frenzy have aroused the brave; Dismembered Poland calls, And through a land opprest, betrayed, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for the most merciless fault-finding. That was his way of showing that he considered you worth while. He had a habit of standing over you in class, holding your paper like a knout. And once or twice—I called myself a conceited little ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... malcontents. From the first they had regarded the Bering expedition with horror. They had joined it under compulsion for only six years; and the exploration was now in its eleventh year. Spanberg, the other Dane, with his brutal tongue and constant recourse to the knout, who had gone to St. Petersburg to report on Japan, they cordially hated. Chirikoff, the Russian, was a universal favorite, and Bering, the supreme commander, was loved for his {22} kindness; but Bering's commands were subject to veto by the Russian underlings; and the Russian underling officers ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... stones, on which burns the sacrifice. The smoke ascends to Heaven. On one side stands the mighty figure of Assyria with uplifted mace ready to strike its awful blow upon the shoulders of helpless Israel. On the other side the lithe, subtle form of Egypt, clasping the knout, watches its chance to bring its treacherous thong upon the helpless shoulders of suffering Israel. But Jehovah may not appear, man may not look on God and live. Jehovah is seen as a glory behind ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... line, notwithstanding the alluring advertisements which periodically appear during the holiday season. Climatically the journey is a delightful one in winter time, for Siberia is then at its best—not the Siberia of the English dramatist: howling blizzards, chained convicts, wolves and the knout, but a smiling land of promise and plenty even under its limitless mantle of snow. The landscape is dreary, of course, but most days you have the blue cloudless sky and dazzling sunshine, so often sought in vain on the Riviera. At mid-day your sunlit compartment is often too warm to be pleasant, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... out a box of pies, wine, and sweets for themselves. The ladies wrapped up in their white dogskins. The drivers disputed as to whose troyka should go ahead, and the youngest, seating himself sideways with a dashing air, swung his long knout and shouted to the horses. The troyka-bells tinkled and the ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy

... volunteer army? Because we consider it the best protection against every attack on the Fatherland. This is it, then! We, too, wish to defend the Fatherland. Suppose that instead we had said in the hour of need: Yes, we want to protect our Fatherland against the knout regiments of the Czar all right enough, but we demand that protection from the militia! Since we do not as yet have the militia, we shall make no use of the standing army, for we would rather let the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... Commons. A very large and symbolic knout might occupy the position of the present mace, and from time to time the SPEAKER could take it up and crack it. As this needs a certain amount of practice it will be necessary to select a fairly horsey man as Speaker, and the Whips, who will follow the same procedure, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various

... marrow of his bones, sinks into death before his time. Instances have occurred where he has expired the day after the punishment. No wonder that the Englishman, Dr. Granville—himself once a surgeon in the Navy—declares, in his work on Russia, that the barbarian "knout" itself is not a greater torture to undergo than ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... It is hardly to be supposed that they did not really merit castigation; and we should best show the sincerity of our respect for Mr. Lamb, senior, in all those cases where we could conscientiously profess respect by an unlimited application of the knout in the cases where ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of the Jews, fasting and praying to God ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... size. Don't be ungrateful to your real colossi; you have cashiered your Haynaus and your Radetzkys too precipitately. Above all, weigh this comparison, which so naturally presents itself to the mind. What is this Mandrin of Lilliput beside Nicholas, Czar, Emperor, and Pope, a power half-Bible, half-knout, who damns and condemns, drills eight hundred thousand soldiers and two hundred thousand priests, holds in his right hand the keys of paradise, and in his left hand the keys of Siberia, and possesses, as his chattel, sixty millions of men—their souls as if he were God, their ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... to the strong mind of Ivan the Great and compressed into a code. Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... Humph! N-n-o-o, I can hardly say that! Yet here we are, tripping together, Republics and proud Autocrat! Two cats and a Boreal Bruin!— So satire will say, I've no doubt. And some will declare it must ruin The Russdom once ruled by the knout. I wonder—I very much wonder— What NICK to this sight would have said— I fear he'd have looked black as thunder, And savage as RURIC the Red. For this did we lose the Crimea? For this did we larrup the Jews? I really had not an idea Republics ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various

... knob knave knife knock knowledge knucks knead knight knoll knuckle knarl knee knit know knell knout ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins

... "conservatism" of the American workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but the shackles and the knout. He will not endure it much longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit— when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied him in such plentitude by aspiring politicians and "able editors," look ye ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... two very formidable enemies to his fame and detractors from his genius—Samuel Johnson and Christopher North. The first pronounced him "a prolific blockhead," "a huge and fertile crab-tree;" the second has wielded the knout against his back with peculiar gusto and emphasis, in a paper on satire and satirists, published in Blackwood for 1828. Had Churchill been alive, he could have easily "retorted scorn"—set a "Christophero" over against the portrait of "Pomposo:" the result had been, as always ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... is here," repeated Samuel Brohl, pointing to an alabaster statuette, posed on a piedouche. The statuette represented a woman bound tightly, on whom two Cossacks were inflicting the knout; the socle bore the inscription, "Polonia ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez

... of the girl's disappearance; and as all Russian criminal proceedings are conducted with great secrecy, he only ascertained by a mere accident that the girl had been sentenced, by a superior court, to receive a certain number of lashes by the knout, and to be sent to Siberia. The crime of which they accused her was that of attempting to poison ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... the load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action—it's awful in Nekrassov. But that's only a horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it. But men, too, can be beaten. A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it. The papa was glad that the birch was covered ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... accomplices. The culprit was sentenced to have his hands and feet cut off, and then to be quartered. By order of the empress, however, he was first beheaded. Eight of his accomplices were also executed, eighteen underwent the knout, and were then exiled to Siberia. Thus terminated a rebellion which cost the lives of more than ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... that she can regain her ascendancy over you, she will slip out of your clutches like a fish, and you will never catch her again. Be as inflexible as law. Show no more charity than the headsman. Hit hard, and then hit again. Strike and keep on striking as if you were giving her the knout. Duchesses are made of hard stuff, my dear Armand; there is a sort of feminine nature that is only softened by repeated blows; and as suffering develops a heart in women of that sort, so it is a work of charity not to spare ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... that day to this there has been a continual triangular conflict between critic, composer, and singer, which up to date, it must be admitted, has been won by the academic pundits, for, although the singer has struggled, she has generally bent under the blows of the critical knout, thereby holding the lyric drama more or less in the state it was in a hundred years ago (every critic and almost every composer will tell you that any modern opera can be sung according to the laws of bel canto ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... stupid in all the elements of tragedy! This unhappy woman, spurred to all kinds of desperate deeds by the awful fear of the knout, had been overcome by that fatal power which ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward

... chair, her face hidden from Lady Maulevrier's falcon eye. Every word uttered by her ladyship stung like the knotted cords of a knout. She knew not whether to be most ashamed of her lover or of herself—of her lover for his obscure position, his hopeless poverty; of herself for her folly in loving such a man. And she did love him, and would fain have pleaded his cause, had she not been cowed by ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... excuse for misunderstanding amongst English people, especially if they belong to the party of progress in English politics; for the obvious things about Russia are so deceptive. All that one saw on the surface were, on the one hand, an irresponsible bureaucracy using the knout, the secret agent, the pogrom, and Siberia for the suppression of anything suspected of threatening existing conditions; and, on the other, a band of devoted reformers and revolutionaries risking all in the cause of political ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... or the Caucasus—but my world they none of them believed in. It didn't exist they said. It was simply my imagination that had painted it, and they laughed at me and said it was held together by the lashes of the knout, and when those went Russia would go too. As I grew up some of them thought that I was revolutionary, and they tried to make me join their clubs and societies. But those were no use to me. They couldn't give me what I ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... such as it was, was administered by the General Police Inspector, and in large cities there was a police officer for every ten houses. Servants who failed to keep the house front clean were punished with the knout. Peter created the Bureau of Information, a court of secret police, and thus inaugurated the terrible spy system which still ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen

... Imprisonment, exile, execution—such was their lot. Their communities, perhaps the happiest then to be found in rural Russia, were broken up, to be flung into remote corners of Transcaucasia or Siberia, and there doomed to the regime of the knout or the darkness of the mines[234]. According to present appearances the persecutors have succeeded. The evangelical faith seems to have been almost stamped out even in South Russia; and the Greek Church has regained its hold on the allegiance, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... knout cutting through the decayed fibre of the man and raising a livid welt on his diseased soul. Galled beyond endurance, his countenance convulsed with fury, he struck wickedly; and the vicious blow of his open palm across her ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... belonging to the court, having excited the anger of the czar—I do not know by what means—was confined in the fort, and there was reason to suppose that he would receive the punishment of the knout on the first market-day. The whole court, and the empress herself, thought him innocent, and considered the anger of the czar as excessive and unjust. Every means was tried to save him, and the first opportunity taken to intercede in his favour. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... knout Whip with a lash of leather thongs, formerly used in Russia for flogging criminals. To flog ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... it; and his heart, unsubdued by the ancient charms, yielded to the magic power of her jewels and her gold. He became the adorer of Bestuchef; he worked diligently in the cabinet of the chancellor, and appeared to be the best of Russian patriots, and seemed ready to kiss the knout with the same devotion with which he kissed the slipper of the chancellor's wife. At this time I resolved to try his patriotism, and commissioned my ambassador to see if his patriotic ardor could not be cooled by gold. Well, my sister, for two thousand ducats, Trenck copied the design ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach



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