PENAL CODE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Penal code

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/pˈinəl koʊd/ Listen

adjective

Penal adj. Of or pertaining to punishment, to penalties, or to crimes and offenses; pertaining to criminal jurisprudence: as:

(a)

Enacting or threatening punishment; as, a penal statue; the penal code.

(b)

Incurring punishment; subject to a penalty; as, a penal act or offense.

(c)

Inflicted as punishment; used as a means of punishment; as, a penal colony or settlement. "Adamantine chains and penal fire."

Penal code (Law), a code of laws concerning crimes and offenses and their punishment.

Penal laws, Penal statutes (Law), laws prohibiting certain acts, and imposing penalties for committing them.

Penal servitude, imprisonment with hard labor, in a prison, in lieu of transportation. (Great Brit.)

Penal suit, Penal action (Law), a suit for penalties.

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Etymology of 'Penal code'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Penal code" Quotes from Famous Books

... as it was selfish—viz., to remove the poor-rates from their own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry? Are not they the same members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in this Catholic emigration plan? What good could we ...

— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... one particular problem of human civilisation; they were shifting and apportioning more equally a load of custom that had really become unmeaning, often accidental, and nearly always unfair. Thus, for instance, a fierce and fighting penal code, which had been perfectly natural when the robbers were as strong as the Government, had become in more ordered times nothing but a base and bloody habit. Thus again Church powers and dues, which had been human when every man felt the Church ...

— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton