Excoriate

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /ɪkˈskɔɹ.iˌeɪt/

Definitions

To severely criticize or scold someone while also describing the act of damaging or removing the skin from a part of the body, as well as publicly denouncing or condemning an action or behavior
The act of harshly reproaching someone intertwines with the physical removal of skin from an area on the body and the public censure of an idea or person
To express strong disapproval in a scathing manner; to scrape or wear away the skin from a surface

Etymology: To excoriate a critic, a policy or a performance is, by the letter of its Latin, to skin it. The harsh review and the flaying knife are the same image, and for most of its life in English the knife came first. The source is Late Latin "excoriare", "to take the hide off, to flay", built from "ex-" ("out of, off") and "corium", "hide, skin, leather". "Corium" left other traces: through French "cuir", "leather", it gave English "cuirass", armour once made of hardened leather, and it survives in "coriaceous", leathery, and as anatomists' name for the dermis, the living layer beneath the surface of the skin. English borrowed the word early in the fifteenth century, though it first appears in Middle English only as a past participle, "excoriat", meaning flayed or stripped of skin. Into Early Modern English that form also served as an ordinary adjective, as "situate" once did beside "situated", before it faded into archaism. Its natural home was the body: skin rubbed raw, scraped or chafed. Medicine still uses it that way. An excoriation is an abrasion, and the compulsive picking of one's own skin is clinically called excoriation disorder. The leap to words came later. Denouncing someone in such scathing terms that they feel stripped bare took over the verb, and now it rarely means anything else. A speech that excoriates its target still carries, under the polish, the image of a raw and bleeding hide.

Synonyms: criticize, censure, denounce, rebuke, berate

Antonyms: commend, praise, laud