Cangue

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /kæŋ/

Definitions

1. A device from ancient China designed to bind an offender's head and arms, functioning primarily as a tool for public shame and legal punishment
2. This historical implement limited the mobility of a person's head and arms in China, traditionally serving to humiliate offenders openly while enforcing judicial sentences
3. A historical apparatus meant to lock the head and arms of a wrongdoer in place, mainly for disgrace and control in public settings

Etymology: The cangue was a wooden collar used in China to pin a prisoner's head and sometimes hands in a public place, and its name arrived in English by way of two other European languages. It came into French from Portuguese "canga," a word meaning a yoke, the wooden frame laid across the necks of oxen or draft animals. Portuguese traders and missionaries brought the term into contact with the Chinese device, and French adopted it for the apparatus. The story is one of a word moving from an animal harness to a human punishment. The yoke sense carried over intact: a heavy wooden frame that fixed its wearer in place, with the neck held fast. Only the wearer changed. English then borrowed the word from French, so the term reached English speakers at a remove from Portuguese, with its meaning shaped by the object it named.