eviscerate
/ɪˈvɪsəreɪt
/verb [with object] formal
1Disembowel (a person or animal): the goat had been skinned and neatly eviscerated...
- Argue the acceptable character of the terrorist attack, and you are rightly eviscerated.
- Too bad there's not a button you can press to eviscerate someone.
- Maybe their next challenge could be to eviscerate him with embroidery scissors and knit something out of the guy's entrails.
Synonyms
disembowel, gut, remove the innards from, draw, dress
rare embowel, disbowel, exenterate, gralloch, paunch
1.1Deprive (something) of its essential content: myriad little concessions that would eviscerate the project...
- But, Brandon says, courts have essentially eviscerated this part of the 21st Amendment - good for economic liberty but bad interpretation of the constitutional text.
- Giving ‘disposal’ passive content would eviscerate that plain purpose.
- He lied us into two hideously unfair tax cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous consequences; he lied us into the Patriot Act, eviscerating our freedoms.
1.2 Surgery Remove the contents of (the eyeball).
Derivatives
evisceration
/ noun ...- But the resistance is doing better now, partly because new media now give the traditionalists heavy aid, most notably in the devastating daily eviscerations of the deeply biased and increasingly shameful big-time press.
- There are swordfights (human and alien), eviscerations and even some surprising-but-welcome computer-generated effects, as the blood of the fallen coagulates into an enormous red monster.
- With a kind of devilish glee he devises for himself ever more terrible punishments, tortures, eviscerations.
Origin
Late 16th century: from Latin eviscerat- 'disembowelled', from the verb eviscerare, from e- (variant of ex-) 'out' + viscera 'internal organs'.