Tumbril

Quick meaning: Tumbril is a noun meaning A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard.

Meaning

A cart well suited to dumping its load easily, being single-axled and also often having a hinged tailboard.

More Meanings

1. (UK, obsolete) A basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the like, to hold hay and other food for sheep.
2. (historical) A kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a ducking stool.
3. (historical) A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Example Sentences

Out go Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney with all their 18th century frills and fripperies, like aristocrats deported on the tumbril.

It is now ascertained that the tumbrel and the torches which figured in the massacre-scene of the 23d of February were prepared beforehand […]

This is a sixteenth-century work done by a Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel, and it is called The Triumph of Death […] He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls.

They’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten.

Word Forms

• tumbrils
• tumbrel
• tumbrill

Synonyms for tumbril

Depending on context, synonyms include dumpcart, tumbrel.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include tumbrel, tumbrill, tumbler, castigatory, dumpcart, dump-cart.

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