Wiktionary

chastise

English

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Alternative forms

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  • chastize (archaic in British English, rare in American English)

Etymology

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From Middle English chastisen, from Old French chastier, from Latin castīgō. See also the doublets chasten and castigate and cf. also chaste.

Pronunciation

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Verb

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chastise (third-person singular simple present chastises, present participle chastising, simple past and past participle chastised)

  1. (transitive) To punish, especially by corporal punishment.
    • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 1 Kings 12:11:
      And now whereas my father did lade you with a heauy yoke, I wil adde to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whippes, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
    • 1885 May 2, John Thomas Caine, edited by John Irvine, “Mormon” Protest Against Injustice: An Appeal for Constitutional and Religious Liberty, published 1885, page 12:
      An army was sent to chastise an unoffending people; to subdue an imaginary insurrection.
    • 1958, Elizabeth Colson, Marriage and the Family among the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia, page 142:
      Thus only the husband is in a position to chastise her, for his own relatives may not exert any physical force over her.
    • 1996, William P. Loewe, The College Student’s Introduction to Christology, →ISBN, page 46:
      If even Israel, the people chosen to be God’s own, scorned and neglected the values God had revealed to be what God willed and desired, then God would marshal the forces of history to chastise them.
    • 2018, Nyx Smith, Shadowrun Legends: Striper Assassin, Catalyst Game Labs:
      “There is a man who must be chastised,” she says softly, lightly. “Chastised in a physical way. It should not be difficult. Not for you.”
  2. (transitive) To castigate; to scold or censure.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:criticize
    • 1975, Cornelius Osgood, The Chinese: A Study of a Hong Kong Community‎[1], volume 2, →ISBN, page 485:
      She feels definitely that Lung Shing is her town, and is not hesitant to chastise people who she thinks are not behaving properly—such as, for example, a woman using loud, vulgar language on the street—although in so doing she may only turn the direction of abuse on herself.
    • 1987 September, Eric Foner, The Second American Revolution; republished as “The Second American Revolution”, in Bertell Ollman, Jonathan Birnbaum, editors, The United States Constitution: 200 Years of […] Socialist Criticism, 1990, →ISBN, page 202:
      Only last year Attorney General Edwin Meese chastised the Supreme Court for a series of decisions based on the legal doctrine of “indoctrination”—that is, that the 14th Amendment requires the states to respect the prohibitions on abuse of power that the Bill of Rights had originally applied to the federal government.
    • 1995, Douglas E. Foley, The Heartland Chronicles, →ISBN, page viii:
      My urban, academic friends chastise me for romanticizing rural life.
    • 2021 August 23, Rebecca Solnit, “Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook”, in The Guardian:
      People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around.

Derived terms

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Translations

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