tumbril
/ˈtʌmbɹɪl/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a ducking stool.
noun
A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard.
noun
A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
Example Sentences
- "They then confined the Dean, while they rifled the house of every valuable article, as well as plate and money; all that was portable they loaded on Mr. Carleton’s own tumbril, to which they harnessed his horse […]"
- "They’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten."
- "This is a sixteenth-century work done by a Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel, and it is called The Triumph of Death […] He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls."
- "It is now ascertained that the tumbrel and the torches which figured in the massacre-scene of the 23d of February were prepared beforehand […]"
- "Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril."
- "If there would be former freemasons on the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, they would be numbered too in the ranks of the émigré armies and counter-revolutionary Chouan rebels, and in tumbrils bound for the guillotine."
Etymology
From Old French tumberel (modern French tombereau, in Anglo-Latin tumberellus), from tomber, tumber (“to fall”).