Word.ws English Dictionary

dry guillotine

dry guillotine noun: forced deportation to a penal colony, especially as a punishment during the French Revolution.

Noun

dry guillotine (uncountable)

  1. (historical, slang) Forced deportation to a penal colony, especially as a punishment during the French Revolution.
    • Nor could they forget the 200-odd priests massacred in the Paris prisons in September 1792, [...] or the 118 who never came back from the dry guillotine that was French Guiana.1989, Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, Routledge, page 52
    • It disposed of political opponents mainly through the ‘dry guillotine’ of deportation rather than by physical liquidation.2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 517

Origin of dry guillotine

As an alternative (and bloodless) punishment to the guillotine.

Questions about dry guillotine

What does dry guillotine mean?
Dry guillotine means forced deportation to a penal colony, especially as a punishment during the French Revolution.
What part of speech is dry guillotine?
Dry guillotine is a noun.

Words near dry guillotine in the dictionary

  1. dry food
  2. Dry Fork
  3. dry ginger
  4. dry gingers
  5. dry goods
  6. dry guillotine
  7. dry haze
  8. dry hazes
  9. dry heater
  10. dry heaters
  11. dry heave

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dry guillotine (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-dry guillotine.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dry guillotine.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dry_guillotine. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.