See bitesheep on Wiktionary
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"ref": "c. 1556, John Foxe, “A Letter of John Careless, answering to the loving Epistle or Letter sent to him before by Master John Philpot”, in Rev. Stephen Reed Cattley, editor, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, volume 8, London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, published 1839, page 172:",
"text": "Wherefore mine advice and most earnest desire is, with all other of your loving friends, that you still keep that order with those bloodthirsty bitesheeps (bishops, I should say) that you have begun. For though in conclusion they will surely have your blood, yet shall they come by it with shame enough, and to their perpetual infamy while the world doth endure.",
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"ref": "1578 December 15, A. Dolm, [A Letter]; republished in “Diarium Secundum”, in The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay, London: David Nutt, 1878, Februarius 1579, page 149:",
"text": "Wherfore the bitesheepe and the recorder beinge owtragiously moved agaynst him, contrary to all justice all Law th[e]y condemned him to bee whipped at a Carts tayle and to bee boored through the eare wᵗʰ a hot iron, wᶜʰ was executed in most dispitful and cruellest manner that might bee executed to any Rooge, […]",
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"ref": "[1860 April 9, Edward Augustus Freeman, “Saint Thomas of Canterbury and His Biographers”, in The National Review; republished as Historical Essays, London: Macmillan and Co., 1875, page 95:",
"text": "If Thomas is rather fond of calling Geoffrey Riddell Archidiabolus instead of Archidiaconus, was it not the established joke of the Reformation to call a Bishop a Bitesheep, and to turn Cardinal Poole into Carnal Fool?",
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"(obsolete, derogatory, dysphemistic, religious slur) A bishop, particularly a Catholic bishop persecuting Protestants."
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"text": "Wherefore mine advice and most earnest desire is, with all other of your loving friends, that you still keep that order with those bloodthirsty bitesheeps (bishops, I should say) that you have begun. For though in conclusion they will surely have your blood, yet shall they come by it with shame enough, and to their perpetual infamy while the world doth endure.",
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"text": "Wherfore the bitesheepe and the recorder beinge owtragiously moved agaynst him, contrary to all justice all Law th[e]y condemned him to bee whipped at a Carts tayle and to bee boored through the eare wᵗʰ a hot iron, wᶜʰ was executed in most dispitful and cruellest manner that might bee executed to any Rooge, […]",
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"(obsolete, derogatory, dysphemistic, religious slur) A bishop, particularly a Catholic bishop persecuting Protestants."
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Download raw JSONL data for bitesheep meaning in All languages combined (3.7kB)
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"msg": "unrecognized sense qualifier: obsolete, derogatory, dysphemistic, religious slur",
"path": [
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"section": "English",
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"title": "bitesheep",
"trace": ""
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"msg": "unrecognized sense qualifier: obsolete, derogatory, dysphemistic, religious slur",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (df33d17 and 4ed51a5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.