in law, the penalty which a person incurs on the commission of a crime. See the article Crimes and Punishment.

The ingenuity of men has been much exerted to torment each other; but the following are the punishments that have been usually adopted in the different countries of the world. The capital punishments have been beheading, crucifixion, burning, roasting, drowning, scalping, hanging by the neck, the arm, or the leg, starving, sawing, exposing to wild beasts, rending asunder by horses drawing opposite ways, burying alive, shooting, blowing from the mouth of a cannon, compulsory deprivation of sleep, rolling in a barrel stuck with nails pointed inwards, poisoning, pressing slowly to death by a weight laid on the breast, casting headlong from a rock, tearing out the bowels, pulling to pieces with red-hot pincers, the rack, the wheel, impaling, fleasing alive, &c. &c.

The punishments short of death have been, fine, pillory, imprisonment, compulsory labour at the mines, galleys, highways, or correction-house; whipping, bastinadoing, mutilation by cutting away the ears, the nose, the tongue, the breasts of women, the foot, the hand; squeezing the marrow from the bones with screws or wedges, castration, putting out the eyes, banishment, running the gauntlet, drumming, shaving off the hair, burning on the hand or forehead, &c.

PUNNING. See Pun.