NOUN
- a form of torture in which the hands are tied behind a person's back and they are lifted off the ground by a rope tied to their wrists, then allowed to drop until their fall is checked with a jerk by the rope
How To Use strappado In A Sentence
- The prisoner told lawyers he was tortured using the strappado, in which a prisoner is suspended from a bar with handcuffs.
- The strappado, also known as the pendulum, was one of the easiest and, therefore, one of the most common torture techniques.
- “But thy ambition must go to sleep for a while, Scharfgerichter, for the stuff that came hither to-day is for dungeon and cord, or perhaps a touch of the rack or strappado — there is no honor to win on them.” Anne of Geierstein
- The strappado as described by Smollett, however, is a more severe form of torture even than that practised by the Inquisition, and we can only hope that his description of its brutality is highly coloured. Travels through France and Italy
- The garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined with the water-torture and the rack, represented the survival of the fittest in the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. Travels through France and Italy
- He describes the ghetto (p. 171), the police arrangements of the place which he finds in the main highly efficient, and the cruel punishment of the strappado. Travels through France and Italy
- In Japan, for example, torture was used from a very early date to extract confessions, and from the beginning of the Tokugawa period in the seventeenth century the Japanese seem to have used something very like the strappado.
- It is believed that Niccolò Machiavelli was subjected to this form of strappado.
- Today, a torturer is likely to equip himself with non-specialized, dual-use items like a baseball bats, cables, iron pipes, pliers, sticks, and maybe a hook on the ceiling for the strappado (suspension by the wrists, tied behind the back). Russ Wellen: What Is It with Men and Torture?
- For the record, strappado -- the act of tying a prisoner's arms behind his back and hoisting him upwards -- is also known as a "stress position. Bob Cesca: Liveblogging The Republican Convention - Day Two
