disembowel

Since she’s played by Frances McDormand, the most famous face in the cast and an actor who could disembowel the patriarchy in her sleep, the abruptness of her departure feels particularly pointed.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 22, 2022

Teams of workers snap laptops in half, smash screens, disembowel computers, and cripple keyboards.

From The Verge ● Jun. 22, 2016

But The Revenant, which called for him to wear several yards of beard, disembowel a bison, and crawl wearily through miles of ice fields, has surely done the trick.

From The Guardian ● Dec. 16, 2015

The New York Public Library wanted to disembowel its historic building at 42nd Street before thinking better of it.

From New York Times ● Jul. 30, 2014

Embowel, em-bow′el, v.t. properly, to enclose in something else; but also used for disembowel, to remove the entrails from:—pr.p. embow′elling; pa.p. embow′elled.—n.

From Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (part 2 of 4: E-M) by Various

In . . . intervals passive, idling and greedy, she munches apples . . . disembowels chocolate eclairs arranges the fire . . lights some sticks of what she calls 'smell-good.'

From Time Magazine Archive

Once the kill is made, the lion disembowels the beast very neatly indeed, and drags the entrails a few feet out of the way.

From The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White

He disembowels it, scrutinizing the internal evidences of its structure and history, and thence infers the causes of past vicissitudes, existing relations, and appearances.

From An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" With a Notice of the Author's "Explanations:" A Sequel to the Vestiges by Anonymous

The queen bee does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him.

From Under the Maples by John Burroughs

At the approach of the breeding season, before the eggs are laid, the Ephippigera turns upon her still living mate, disembowels him, and eats as much of him as her appetite will allow.

From Social Life in the Insect World by Bernard Miall

Keck’s horizontal equestrian sculpture, which intimates occupation of the land, became Walker’s vertical, a grotesque standing humanoid, disemboweled.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 22, 2025

These days Chen, now 49 and sporting closely cropped hair with just a hint of gray, is not worried about being disemboweled during lunch.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 27, 2023

Director and screenwriter Scott Cooper builds tension with a series of seemingly unconnected clues — a note fragment, a military jacket missing a decoration, some animals disemboweled.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 6, 2023

It was, I realized, a textbook illustration of the deep-seated dislike many men have for leopard print—the fear that they, too, might be disemboweled and displayed by the woman in the glistening pelt.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2018

I found some straws that need to be disemboweled.

From "Far from the Tree" by Robin Benway

As Lebanon marks the 47th anniversary of the start of the war on Wednesday, Ghassan's daughter and other relatives of those killed in the blast are fighting government plans to demolish the disembowelled silos.

From Reuters ● Apr. 13, 2022

Hill sides were strewn with debris and dotted by houses disembowelled by the storms powerful winds.

From BBC ● Sep. 10, 2017

It is disembowelled without the hide being taken off, and, since there can be no hide, there can be no quarry.

From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White

The Post Office still stood, but the roof was gone and the inside of it was empty: a hulk, a disembowelled carcase....

From Changing Winds A Novel by St. John G. (St. John Greer) Ervine

Look at that square of ground, that space of God's earth that was once sweet and fair, torn, desecrated, disembowelled!

From The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

I know I wasn't supposed to, but the second time I watched the emotionally disemboweling prestige weeper "Dear Edward," the Apple TV+ adaptation of Ann Napolitano's best-selling 2020 novel, I thought of Prince Harry.

From Salon ● Feb. 26, 2023

“But elephants are also living tanks, capable of killing, disemboweling, knocking down houses, and eating a farmer’s entire crop for the season. Human-elephant conflict can go both ways.”

From New York Times ● Dec. 6, 2022

As usual, Signor Mussolini managed in his discourse to turn several familiar ideas inside out, disemboweling them with hearty, ogrish gust.

From Time Magazine Archive

The grim allegory, showing a U.S. soldier disemboweling a Japanese Frankenstein monster behind which looms an equally monstrous Nazi ogre, is the largest of seven pictures just completed by Artist Thomas Hart Benton.

From Time Magazine Archive

Strange, but it felt normal to be disemboweling fish together.

From "The Line Tender" by Kate Allen

He looked over to Nap, who fiercely battled with a sofa cushion, and was now disembowelling it through a rent in the cover.

From Bunker Bean by Harry Leon Wilson

The filial hero varies this a little, when "disembowelling" the Algerine commander, by requesting the Deity to "have pity on" his parent—a proceeding faintly suggestive of a survival in his mind of the human-sacrifice period.

From A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 From the Beginning to 1800 by George Saintsbury

On either hand, at every hundred yards, instead of the houseless, disembowelling paepaes of Nuka-hiva, populous houses turned out their inhabitants to cry “Kaoha!” to the passers-by.

From The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The customary device, where contemporaries are concerned, of disembowelling the victim's name, and leaving it a skeleton of consonants, is a formal concession which in effect concedes nothing.

From Angels & Ministers by Laurence Housman

She was sitting there, pretending that she didn't know that she was very, very slowly and deliberately jerking out the very vitals of that pattern, in fact disembowelling it.

From The New Warden by Mrs. David G. Ritchie