A form of torture or punishment in which a person is hoisted and then dropped suddenly, causing severe pain or injury.
From French 'estrapade', possibly from Italian 'strappare' meaning 'to pull or tear'. The word describes a brutal judicial punishment used in medieval Europe, where victims were suspended by a rope and rope dropped suddenly.
The estrapade was actually one of the last officially sanctioned torture methods in Europe—it wasn't abolished in some places until the late 1700s, shocking by modern standards but common in its time.
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