"Chinese water torture" meaning in English

See Chinese water torture in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} Chinese water torture (uncountable)
  1. A form of torture in which water is repetitively dripped onto the forehead of a victim who is restrained. Tags: uncountable Categories (topical): Torture Related terms: death by a thousand cuts, dripping water hollows a stone Translations (torture method): 水刑 (shuǐxíng) (Chinese Mandarin), kiinalainen vesikidutus (Finnish), supplice de la goutte d’eau [masculine] (French), chińska tortura wodna [feminine] (Polish), gota china [feminine] (Spanish), kinesisk vattentortyr [common-gender] (Swedish)
    Sense id: en-Chinese_water_torture-en-noun-aXQo02YE Disambiguation of Torture: 80 20 Disambiguation of 'torture method': 93 7
  2. (idiomatic, by extension) Any repeated irritation that builds to deliver cumulative damage. Tags: broadly, idiomatic, uncountable
    Sense id: en-Chinese_water_torture-en-noun-pPLMj1Y9 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 39 61 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 28 72 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 24 76

Download JSON data for Chinese water torture meaning in English (4.7kB)

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  "lang_code": "en",
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          "ref": "2002, Greg Emmanuel, Extreme Encounters",
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          "ref": "2006, Jacqueline Pearce, The Truth About Rats (and Dogs), page 1",
          "text": "The plunk of the keys was beginning to feel like Chinese water torture, each note a painful drip. Is that a real thing? Chinese water torture, I mean.",
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          "ref": "2007, Dan Clark, The Thrill of Teaching, page 61",
          "text": "My name is General Robinson Risner. I was the highest-ranking prisoner-of-war in the Vietnam War. I spent seven years locked up in solitary confinement. I was tortured beyond belief. I limp because of it. Today I still have a hole in the front of my skull from the Chinese water torture inflicted on me.",
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          "ref": "1994, James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, page 162",
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          "ref": "2007, Theresa Alan, Getting Married, page 8",
          "text": "The end wasn't about money, nobody had an affair, and no firearms were involved. I think what I learned from the experience is that if there are things that bother you before you get married and you can't even discuss them, can't even talk about how to change or deal with whatever issues are going on, run. It was an exercise in Chinese water torture for me.",
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      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "roman": "shuǐxíng",
      "sense": "torture method",
      "word": "水刑"
    },
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      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "torture method",
      "word": "kiinalainen vesikidutus"
    },
    {
      "code": "fr",
      "lang": "French",
      "sense": "torture method",
      "tags": [
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      "word": "supplice de la goutte d’eau"
    },
    {
      "code": "pl",
      "lang": "Polish",
      "sense": "torture method",
      "tags": [
        "feminine"
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      "word": "chińska tortura wodna"
    },
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      "lang": "Spanish",
      "sense": "torture method",
      "tags": [
        "feminine"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.