carnifex

plural carnifexes · plural carnifices

1. archaichistoricalAn executioner.

   ‘Lesser places have no more than a carnifex, who takes life and performs such excruciations as the judicators there decree.’

   1980, Gene Wolfe, chapter XIII, in The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun; 1), New York: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 123

   2 more examples

   “[T]he carnifex, or executioner there, is brandishing his gulley ower near the King's face, seeing he is within reach of his weapon.”

   1831, Walter Scott, Fortunes of Nigel

   Vorónezh: Ovid thrusts abruptly wide / the ice-locked shutters, discommodes his lyre / to Caesar's harbingers. Interrogation, / whatever is most feared. Truth's fatal vogue, / sad carnifex, self-styled of blood and wax.

   2013, Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, Oxford University Press, →OCLC, page 535