flense

English

WOTD – 25 June 2012

Alternative forms

• flench
• flinch

Etymology

From Danish flense (now spelled flænse).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /flɛns/

  • Audio (Southern England):

    (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛns

Verb

flense (third-person singular simple present flenses, present participle flensing, simple past and past participle flensed)

1. To strip the blubber or skin from, as from a whale, seal, etc.
   • 1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 198:

     In this domain right sex is capital, it flenses the feelings of all the poisonous artifices brought in by the think-box in the guise of clever ideas.

   • 2001, Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, →ISBN, page 191:

     His eyes sprang open. Umegat stared straight at him for the fraction of a second, and Cazaril felt flensed.

   • 2004, Stephen R. Donaldson, The Runes of the Earth, →ISBN, page 5:

     For that reason, among others, he would never evince the particular guantness, the cut and flagrant sense of purpose - all compromise and capacity for surrender flensed away - which had made Thomas Covenant ir-refusable to her.

   • 2008, Ian C. Esselemont, Return of the Crimson Guard, →ISBN, page 569:

     It engulfed screaming soldiers who disappeared before his eyes, their flesh, armor, even bone, flensed into a suspended mist that was heading straight for them.

   • 2011, Dominic Smith, Bright and Distant Shores, page 106:

     The Lemakot in the north strangled widows and threw them into the cremation pyres of their dead husbands. If they defeated potential invaders the New Irish hanged the vanquished from banyan trees, flensed their windpipes, removed their heads, left their intestines to jerk in the sun.

Synonyms

• flay, fleece, skin

Translations

To strip the blubber or skin from, as from a whale, seal, etc

• Armenian: մաշկել (hy) (maškel), քերթել (hy) (kʻertʻel), մորթել (hy) (mortʻel)
• Danish: flænse
• Finnish: nylkeä (fi)
• German: flensen (de)
• Greenlandic: pilappoq
• Low German:

  German Low German: flinsen

• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: flense

  Nynorsk: flense

• Russian: сдирать (ru) (sdiratʹ)
• Swedish: flänsa (sv)

German

Pronunciation

• Audio:

  (file)

Verb

flense

1. inflection of flensen:
   1. first-person singular present
   2. first/third-person singular subjunctive I
   3. singular imperative