to disembowel
- verb
- /ˌdɪsɪmˈbaʊəl/
- Offensive
- Before cooking the fish, you must disembowel it to remove the internal organs.
We're Brits and we tortured him and we cut off his genitals and we disemboweled him and took his entrails around the City of London as a warning to others.
- We're Brits and we tortured him and we cut off his genitals and we disemboweled him and took his entrails around the City of London as a warning to others.
- We had teams where men who have been wounded, they would disembowel.
Examples
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Plain spotted the disemboweled hulk while scouting for photo locations.
Fiction book (2001) -
You know, at first we thought they disembowel their prey, but no.
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Take it away and disembowel it.
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We lock it down and disembowel it.
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What we have on our hands is a dead body, disemboweled.
Academic text (1998) -
In the act of pulling out, he gets disemboweled and dies.
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Only they were disemboweled in such a meticulous fashion.
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They would disembowel me.
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One has been disemboweled, its intestines draped over its back and floating alongside.
Academic text (1998) -
With their tunics open, the Zulus would disembowel them, opening men from balls to breastbone with one swift strike.
Fiction book (1996)
Synonyms
To remove the inner parts of an animal or a building
To remove the inside parts of a body, often in animals or surgery
Remove the inside organs of an animal before cooking
To remove the contents of an organ by surgery
How Violent
Surface Forms
Morphology
disembowel = embowel (transparent) = dis + em + bowel
While 'embowel' is analyzable as 'em-' + 'bowel', the verb meaning is somewhat specialized and the prefix 'em-' is not fully transparent in semantics, so the immediate base is only partially clear.
Etymology
Disembowel comes from two parts: dis- meaning 'away' (as in disappear) and bowel meaning 'intestines'. So to disembowel is to take the intestines 'away', to pull them out of a person or animal, which is why it means removing the internal organs.