Word.ws English Dictionary

pilloried

pilloried is the simple past and past participle of pillory.

Meaning of pillory

Verb

pillory (third-person singular simple present pillories, present participle pillorying, simple past and past participle pilloried)

  1. (transitive) To put in a pillory.
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To subject to humiliation, scorn, ridicule or abuse.
    • There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in...1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 50, in Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC
  3. (transitive) To criticize harshly.
    • The breakthrough came through Torres who, pilloried for his miss against Manchester United a week earlier, scored his second goal of the season.2011 September 24, Aled Williams, “Chelsea 4 - 1 Swansea”, in BBC Sport

See all 4 meanings of pillory

Words formed from pilloried

Questions about pilloried

What is pilloried the simple past and past participle of?
Pilloried is the simple past and past participle of pillory.

Words near pilloried in the dictionary

  1. pillmongers
  2. Pillnitz
  3. pillock
  4. pillocks
  5. pillocky
  6. pilloried
  7. pillories
  8. pillorise
  9. pillorised
  10. pillorises
  11. pillorising

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pilloried (page history and authors); pillory (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-pilloried.ogg.

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