cyphonism.
An ancient punishment in which the criminal was smeared with honey and exposed to insects.
Meaning & usage
An ancient punishment in which the criminal was smeared with honey and exposed to insects.
An ancient form of punishment involving a sort of wooden pillory by which the victim's neck was bent or weighed downward.
Where this word comes from
Borrowed from New Latin cȳphōnismus, from Ancient Greek κῡφωνισμός (kūphōnismós), from κῡ́φων (kū́phōn, “wooden collar, bent yoke”) + -ισμός (-ismós, abstract noun suffix). Κῡφωνισμός (Kūphōnismós) appears only in the scholia on Aristophanes’ Plutus, where it is simply glossed as the punishment involving the kūphōn, and in the Byzantine Suda, which states that it refers to a “bad and ruinous” punishment. The Suda additionally transmits a fragment of Claudius Aelianus describing a punishment in which one bound to a kūphōn or pillory would be doused in milk and honey and exposed to insects for 20 days. Beginning with the Renaissance humanist Caelius Rhodiginus, “cyphonism” was generally taken to refer to this punishment in particular.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.