guillotine
Americannoun
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a device for beheading a person by means of a heavy blade that is dropped between two posts serving as guides: widely used during the French Revolution.
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an instrument for surgically removing the tonsils.
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any of various machines in which a vertical blade between two parallel uprights descends to cut or trim metal, stacks of paper, etc.
verb (used with object)
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to behead by the guillotine.
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to cut with or as if with a guillotine.
noun
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a device for beheading persons, consisting of a weighted blade set between two upright posts
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execution by this instrument
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a device for cutting or trimming sheet material, such as paper or sheet metal, consisting of a blade inclined at a small angle that descends onto the sheet
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a surgical instrument for removing tonsils, growths in the throat, etc
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Also called: closure by compartment. (in Parliament, etc) a form of closure under which a bill is divided into compartments, groups of which must be completely dealt with each day
verb
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to behead (a person) by guillotine
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(in Parliament, etc) to limit debate on (a bill, motion, etc) by the guillotine
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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guillotinesimple
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guillotinessimple
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have guillotinedperfect
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has guillotinedperfect
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am guillotiningprogressive
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are guillotiningprogressive
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is guillotiningprogressive
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have been guillotiningperfect progressive
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has been guillotiningperfect progressive
Past
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guillotinedsimple
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had guillotinedperfect
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was guillotiningprogressive
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were guillotiningprogressive
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had been guillotiningperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of guillotine
1785–95; named after J. I. Guillotin (1738–1814), French physician who urged its use
Explanation
Invented in France, the guillotine is a device used to behead people convicted of crimes. The guillotine was named after Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a French doctor who promoted the machine because it was a quicker and more humane way to cut off a person’s head. Guillotine is also as verb. The last time the French government guillotined someone was in 1977, and in 1981 the death penalty was abolished in France.
Vocabulary lists containing guillotine
You Name It: Eponyms
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Liberty, Equality, Vocabulary: The French Revolution
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National Spelling Bee '14: Prelims Round 2
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A woman protester nearby was dressed as Marie-Antoinette, the queen executed by guillotine during the French revolution.
From Barron's ● May 1, 2026
The guillotine blade that was allegedly used comes from the Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors, by descent from the family of Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner, whose son Henri may have pulled the lever.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 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
The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought.
From Salon ● Nov. 14, 2025
“They don’t use the guillotine anymore,” Soheil says.
From "Internment" by Samira Ahmed
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
“During downturns,” Stern says, “the financial guillotines hit hardest in regions where clusters are weakest.”
From Nature ● May 3, 2016
A reviewer for an English newspaper saw guillotines.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 5, 2015
"I tell you there are no guillotines in England."
From Self-Raised Or, From the Depths by Southworth, Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte
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
Marie Antoinette sent the jewellery away for safekeeping before she was guillotined during the French revolution.
From BBC ● Nov. 9, 2021
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
If somebody says, "Miracles must be reconsidered in the light of rational experience," I answer affably, "But I hope that our enlightened leader, Hébert, will not insist on guillotining that poor French queen."
From Eugenics and Other Evils by Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
