Scourging

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The practice of imposing severe penalties or rebukes
2. A physical act of beating or whipping someone severely as a form of punishment ; a strict or intense reprimand or penalty inflicted on a person or group
3. The process of delivering a brutal or violent lashing to inflict pain ; the application of forceful verbal or disciplinary action to correct or punish

Etymology: The whip came first and the verb followed. "Scourge" entered Middle English as a noun for a lash or whip, and the sense of affliction or calamity grew alongside it, so that a plague or a tyrant could be called a scourge long before anyone was whipped for it. The noun probably descends from Vulgar Latin "excoriata", a strip of hide, built on Latin "excoriare", meaning to strip the skin from. An alternative route runs through Latin "corrigia", a whip, which is also the source of a theory about the word's ancestry, and the sources cannot settle which path is correct. The verb "scourge" was formed in Middle English from that noun with the suffix "-en", meaning to whip, afflict or punish. The earlier Anglo-Norman and Old French verb "escorgier" offers another possible route, so the verb may have arrived either way. "Scourging" is simply the verb's present participle and gerund, which is why its modern sense of severe rebuke sits comfortably beside the literal flogging it once named.

Synonyms: whipping, flogging, beating, punishing, chastising

Antonyms: praising, rewarding, forgiving, excusing, absolving