flay
Other forms: flayed; flaying; flays
Nasty word, flay. It means to peel or beat the skin of a person or animal, and not necessarily a dead one, either. Nowadays it more commonly means to criticize harshly someone or something, usually in public, leaving them raw and wounded.
To be flayed alive was a common punishment in ancient times for political enemies or traitors. The ancient Assyrians were particularly good at it. Today, if you want to have your skin — metaphorically — peeled in public, you go on reality TV. It can be equally nasty.
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Vocabulary lists containing flay
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Harry can't wait to return for his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, until a house elf named Dobby warns him of terrible danger ahead. When students start turning to stone — and Harry is a prime suspect — the boy wizard must figure out what's really going on at Hogwarts.
As you read Part 1 of Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's "The Odyssey," learn this word list. Here are links to lists for texts in Grade 9's Collection 6: elements of an epic, The Odyssey, Part 1, The Odyssey, Part 2, The Cruelest Journey, The Real Reasons We Explore Space