What is another word for guillotines?

Pronunciation: [ɡˈɪlətˌiːnz] (IPA)

Guillotine is a term that refers to a machine used for execution in the past in which a large blade falls swiftly to sever the head of a person from their body. The term has become synonymous with the grim and violent act of execution, and there are several other words one can use to describe the same concept. Alternate terms for guillotines include decapitation machines, executioners, execution devices, and beheading machines. Regardless of what term is used to describe them, it's difficult to contemplate such an act of violence without feeling a sense of horror and disgust.

Synonyms for Guillotines:

What are the hypernyms for Guillotines?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.
  • Other hypernyms:

    Capital punishment devices, Capital punishment instruments, Decapitation devices, Execution devices, implements of execution.

Usage examples for Guillotines

The glare of the flames, the crash of the enemy's bombs, the explosion of the two powder-ships, frenzied many a soul; and scores of those who could find no place in the boats flung themselves into the sea rather than face the pikes and guillotines of the Jacobins.
"The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2)"
John Holland Rose
Bandits stood in groups chatting and quarrelling about the more or less glorious manner in which certain famous guillotines had died.
"Paris From the "Three Cities""
Emile Zola
They pressed and panted the way mobs always do; mobs that lynch and torture and dance around bonfires and guillotines and try to drag you down to trample you to death because they can't stand you if your name is Harry and you want to be different.
"This Crowded Earth"
Robert Bloch

Famous quotes with Guillotines

  • As the world's finest democracy, we do not do guillotines. But there are other less bloody rituals of humiliation, designed to reassure the populace that order is restored, the Republic cleansed.
    William Greider
  • The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.
    Stephen Jay Gould
  • So we're led by denial like lambs to the slaughter Serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water And the old farm road's a four-lane that leads to the mall And our dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall.
    Ani DiFranco

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