flense

present singular third person flenses · participle present flensing · participle past flensed · past flensed · alternative flench · alternative flinch

1. To strip the blubber or skin from, as from a whale, seal, etc.

   His eyes sprang open. Umegat stared straight at him for the fraction of a second, and Cazaril felt flensed.

   2001, Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion, →ISBN, page 191

   4 more examples

   In this domain right sex is capital, it flenses the feelings of all the poisonous artifices brought in by the think-box in the guise of clever ideas.

   1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 198

   For that reason, among others, he would never evince the particular guantness, the cut and flagrant sense of purpose - all compromise and capacity for surrender flensed away - which had made Thomas Covenant ir-refusable to her.

   2004, Stephen R. Donaldson, The Runes of the Earth, →ISBN, page 5

   It engulfed screaming soldiers who disappeared before his eyes, their flesh, armor, even bone, flensed into a suspended mist that was heading straight for them.

   2008, Ian C. Esselemont, Return of the Crimson Guard, →ISBN, page 569

   The Lemakot in the north strangled widows and threw them into the cremation pyres of their dead husbands. If they defeated potential invaders the New Irish hanged the vanquished from banyan trees, flensed their windpipes, removed their heads, left their intestines to jerk in the sun.

   2011, Dominic Smith, Bright and Distant Shores, page 106

   Synonyms: flay, fleece, skin