excarnation
excarnation noun: the act of removing flesh.
Noun
excarnation (countable and uncountable, plural excarnations)
- The act of removing flesh.
- The burial practice of removing (or causing to be removed) the flesh and organs of the dead, leaving only the bones, especially the practice of laying out corpses for vultures to strip bare.
- Vultures seem to have been used for a funeral practice of excarnation: after the flesh had been cleaned from the bones, the bones were interred in the shrines.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 144
Forms of excarnation
| plural | excarnations |
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Questions about excarnation
- What does excarnation mean?
- Excarnation means the act of removing flesh.
- What part of speech is excarnation?
- Excarnation is a noun.
- What is the plural of excarnation?
- The plural of excarnation is excarnations.
Words near excarnation in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: excarnation (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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Cite this entry: “excarnation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/excarnation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.