Citations:centesimation

English citations of centesimation

• 1763, A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (2nd ed.), volume 1, page 522, “centeſimation”

  CENTESIMATION, a milder kind of military puniſhment, in caſes of deſertion, mutiny, and the like, when only every hundredth man is executed.

• 1822, Reginald Heber, The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, volume XIII, page 413

  Sometimes the criminals were decimated by lot, as appears in Polybiusˡ, Tacitusᵐ, Plutarchn, Appianᵒ, Dioᵖ, Julius Capitolinus^q, who also mentions a centesimation.

• 1897, The Columbian Cyclopedia (Garretson, Cox & Company), volume 6, “centesimate”

  […] v. -māt, to inflict the punishment of centesimation.

• 1980, Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol [eds.], Encounter (Congress for Cultural Freedom), volume 54, page 71

  Essential for the historical novelist are acutiator (“in medieval times, a sharpener of weapons”) and awm (“forty gallons of wine in old England”), and — if he specialises in the grandeur that was Rome, the glory that was Greece — centesimation, though it carries only one-tenth the sensation value of “decimation”, and petalism (“the custom in ancient Syracuse of banishing a citizen for five years”).³

• 1992, Laurence Urdang, Three Toed Sloths and Seven League Boots: A Dictionary of Numerical Expressions (Marboro Books; →ISBN, 9781566190503), page 151

  decimate, to select by lot and put to death every tenth man of (a captured army or body of prisoners or mutineers), a barbarity occasionally practised in antiquity. Compare ¹⁄₁₀₀: centesimation.