Word.ws English Dictionary

cyphonism

cyphonism noun: an ancient punishment in which the criminal was smeared with honey and exposed to insects.

Noun

cyphonism (uncountable)

  1. (rare) An ancient punishment in which the criminal was smeared with honey and exposed to insects.
    • [In kyphonism] the body of the sufferer was anointed with honey, and so exposed to the sun that the flies and wasps might be tempted to torment him. Suidas gives us the fragment of an ancient law, which punished those who contemned the laws with kyphonism for twenty days; after which they were...1842 July 16, “Kyphonism”, in The Illustrated London News, volume 1, number 10, page 158, column 3
    • Another who got honey was Lucy; but it was the honey of cyphonism,—a little thin sweetening of praise spread over her to attract swarming insects with their bites and stings.1866, J. T. Trowbridge, Lucy Arlyn, page 166
  2. (rare) An ancient form of punishment involving a sort of wooden pillory by which the victim's neck was bent or weighed downward.

Origin of cyphonism

Borrowed from New Latin cȳphōnismus, from Ancient Greek κῡφωνισμός (kūphōnismós), from κῡ́φων (kū́phōn, “wooden collar, bent yoke”) + -ισμός (-ismós, abstract noun suffix). Κῡφωνισμός (Kūphōnismós) appears only in the scholia on Aristophanes’ Plutus, where it is simply glossed as the punishment involving the kūphōn, and in the Byzantine Suda, which states that it refers to a “bad and ruinous” punishment. The Suda additionally transmits a fragment of Claudius Aelianus describing a punishment in which one bound to a kūphōn or pillory would be doused in milk and honey and exposed to insects for 20 days. Beginning with the Renaissance humanist Caelius Rhodiginus, “cyphonism” was generally taken to refer to this punishment in particular.

Questions about cyphonism

What does cyphonism mean?
Cyphonism means an ancient punishment in which the criminal was smeared with honey and exposed to insects.
What part of speech is cyphonism?
Cyphonism is a noun.

Words near cyphonism in the dictionary

  1. cyphertext
  2. cyphertexts
  3. Cypherts
  4. cyphonaute
  5. cyphonautes
  6. cyphonism
  7. cyphopod
  8. cyphopods
  9. cyphosis
  10. cyphosomatic
  11. cypin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cyphonism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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