pillory

1. 1.

   a wooden instrument of punishment on a post with holes for the wrists and neck; offenders were locked in and so exposed to public scorn

   Broaderinstrument of punishment

Other forms of pillory

plural

pillories·

past tense or participle

pilloried

present participle

pillorying·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about pillory

What does pillory mean?

pillory means "expose to ridicule or public scorn". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in pillory?

pillory has 3 syllables: pil-lo-ry. The stress falls on "pil". In IPA it is /ˈpɪlɚi/.

What is another word for pillory?

Close synonyms include gibbet, savage, blast, crucify. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is pillory a common word?

pillory is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.