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Torture   /tˈɔrtʃər/   Listen
noun
Torture  n.  
1.
Extreme pain; anguish of body or mind; pang; agony; torment; as, torture of mind. "Ghastly spasm or racking torture."
2.
Especially, severe pain inflicted judicially, either as punishment for a crime, or for the purpose of extorting a confession from an accused person, as by water or fire, by the boot or thumbkin, or by the rack or wheel.
3.
The act or process of torturing. "Torture, which had always been deciared illegal, and which had recently been declared illegal even by the servile judges of that age, was inflicted for the last time in England in the month of May, 1640."


verb
torture  v. t.  (past & past part. tortured; pres. part. torturing)  
1.
To put to torture; to pain extremely; to harass; to vex.
2.
To punish with torture; to put to the rack; as, to torture an accused person.
3.
To wrest from the proper meaning; to distort.
4.
To keep on the stretch, as a bow. (Obs.) "The bow tortureth the string."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Torture" Quotes from Famous Books



... laid them aside until the next occasion when I should feel disposed for self-torture, and got out of bed. A bath and breakfast braced me up, and I left the house in a reasonably cheerful frame ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... than he had intended. And not content with simply maintaining this absurd opinion, they taunted him with it on his death-bed, so that he was not even allowed to die in peace. Nothing was wanting to fill his bitter cup. How terrible must have been the mental torture to wring from so resigned a soul the exclamation, "O God! O God! to die thus with contumely and disgrace!" The German is still more expressive,—"Ach, Gott! ach, Gott! so abkratzen muessen mit ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... to fleck the evilly up-lifted lips glistening back to the glistening fangs of the wolverines, now miles apart, but still heading in the same general line, and upon their faces began to set a look of fiends under torture; but never for a moment did they ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... less extreme than this will readily suggest themselves, in which a hankering which cannot be fulfilled may prove itself a torture. A more ordinary case is that of a man who has no particular vices, such as drink or sensuality, but yet has been attached entirely to things of the physical world, and has lived a life devoted to business or to aimless social functions. For him the astral world ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... this chapter by questioning yet another of the stories, the frequent repetition of which has given the tribes of the interior the reputation of being savages of the worst type, namely, the story that it is the practice of Kayans to torture the captives taken in battle. This evil repute is, we have no doubt, largely due to the fact that very few Europeans have acquired any intimate first-hand acquaintance with the Kayans or Kenyahs; and that too often the stories told by Sea Dayaks have been uncritically ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall


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