guillotine

They hover with a calculated theatricality: “Hat Rack” drops like a predatory spider; the shovels’ metal scoops are poised like guillotine blades; and “Bottle Rack” dives like a missile—an apt metaphor for their impact.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 30, 2026

A woman protester nearby was dressed as Marie-Antoinette, the queen executed by guillotine during the French revolution.

From Barron's ● May 1, 2026

“Consolidation now hangs over the film industry like a guillotine, with job losses likely and the future of the theatrical movie-going experience in question,” Lauzen wrote in her report.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 1, 2026

For the seventh time in a row in tournaments where a guillotine falls, Smith had failed to survive the cut.

From BBC ● Dec. 2, 2025

In A Tale of Two Cities, when the guillotine chops off a head, the sound effects team hacked a cabbage with a cleaver.

From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow

After drying during a series of slow corkscrews, the new magazine’s edges were chopped smooth by guillotines and emerged through an opening.

From New York Times ● Jun. 16, 2024

Even news of guillotines, massacres, and growing public hostility to religion did not deter the most hopeful Francophiles, who dismissed such accounts as exaggerations by British propagandists.

From Slate ● Oct. 24, 2022

He began another opinion about an insurance dispute with this: “Haunted houses may be full of ghosts, goblins, and guillotines, but it’s their more prosaic features that pose the real danger.”

From Washington Post ● Feb. 18, 2017

“During downturns,” Stern says, “the financial guillotines hit hardest in regions where clusters are weakest.”

From Nature ● May 3, 2016

Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits.

From Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

Because of this mediocre king, who clung so desperately to the fantasies of absolutism that he was later overthrown and guillotined by his own people, the American experiment with republican government was able to commence.

From Slate ● May 30, 2025

The French have maintained a love-hate relationship with kings ever since they guillotined King Louis XVI in 1793.

From Washington Times ● Mar. 23, 2023

It guillotined the notion that great cuisine was necessarily French in its fundamentals.

From New York Times ● Nov. 27, 2021

Another veteran director; the reclusive Terrence Malick, will premiere his World War II story, A Hidden Life, about a German conscientious objector guillotined by the Nazis in 1943.

From BBC ● Apr. 18, 2019

That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

The “age of chivalry is gone,” Edmund Burke lamented after the guillotining of Marie Antoinette of France on Oct.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

France likes to dream of revolution, ever re-enacting the popular uprising of 1789 that led to the guillotining of the king and queen and the abolition of the monarchy three years later.

From New York Times ● Mar. 24, 2023

Otherwise – as in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda and the guillotining of Andrea and Maddalena in Giordano's Andrea Chénier – the pleasure is all in the anticipation.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 20, 2011

Spoiled by her father, owner of Covent Garden theatre, Fanny was so high-spirited that at her French boarding school the only punishment that could subdue her was seeing a guillotining.

From Time Magazine Archive

And there was one doughty Scot—Dalrymple of Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by hand.

From The Romance of the Reaper by Herbert Newton Casson