Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A public executioner who beheads condemned prisoners.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A chief person; a head man.
- n. One who cuts off the heads of condemned persons; a public executioner.
- n. A laborer in a colliery who conveys the coal from the workings to the horseway.
Wiktionary
- n. An executioner whose method of dispatching the condemned is decapitation.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. An executioner who cuts off heads.
WordNet 3.0
- n. an executioner who beheads the condemned person
Etymologies
- From head’s + man. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“The coward and the tyrant call the headsman at any provocation, and fall to him the same, Inaglione had written.”
“The executioner who is called a headsman then walks forward approaching the chair from the rear.”
“Henceforward you shall no longer be called the headsman, but the last of the judges.”
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844
“A whale-boat, when going in chase, has a crew of six men: one is called the headsman, the other the boat-steerer.”
“The speed with which he cleared the service of Democrats earned him the title "headsman" and is indicated by the estimate that he removed one every three minutes for the first year.”
“It was let down to the ground, and there came the "headsman," whose task it was to sever the head, with two or three swift strokes.”
“That is, instead of the sailors being divided at night into two bands, alternately on deck every four hours, there were four watches, each composed of a boat's crew, the "headsman" (always one of the mates) excepted.”
“The "headsman," taking the part of conductor, pushes behind.”
“Gobseck is a banker, just as the headsman is a doctor.”
“( "headsman," hence by implication "executioner") of the word rewwas, although I cannot find an instance of the word being employed in this sense.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘headsman’.
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In the Collieries
A collection of coal mining and colliery terms. Some British, some Scots, and some, Other. Many terms are quite to the point; others colorful and imaginative.
Also see Middlesmith's li...fire-damp, black-damp, choke-damp, skip, basket, gallery, Gregory lamp, pit, balance, balancer, tenter, coupler and 313 more...
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Man
Everything that contains a man in it
taxman, salesman, common man, spaceman, neolithic man, straw man, seaman, fireman, spiderman, overman, old man, con man and 373 more...
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Speak, Memory
Words gathered while reading Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov.
cracknel, shingly, glaucous, stretcherman, goodish, loden, gutticle, percha, plasticine, instar, wellhole, camera-lucida and 357 more...
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