Garrote, garrotte, or garotte

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Grammarist

To garrote someone is to strangle him or her with a cord or wire. Outside the United States it is spelled garrotte. garrote is also the device with which someone is strangled. It is a wire with a handle at each end that is wrapped around the neck and twisted to make tight.

Oddly, the spelling garotte is also acceptable, but in practice it will be seen as a misspelling by most readers.

Originally the strangulation device was attached to a chair and tightened by turning a stick, and was also used as a form of torture. The Spanish definition of garrote is stick or club, referencing the first use of the term when a prisoner was beaten as torture or execution.

Examples

The lowlights were scattered pixels this time as the Giants made a string of mistakes afield and on the bases — any one of them good as a garrote with Clayton Kershaw on the mound. [CSN Bay Area]

“I was going to tell her I was just as good as she was but then, I was in a strange city, and she might get her dodgy relations to come round and garrotte me with piano wire in the middle of the dark and desperate night,” she said. [Wales Online]

The final beats of the action are linked, via voice-over, to AA’s 12 steps, none of which exactly cover how to fend off a garrote attack. [LA Weekly]

This could greatly improve job satisfaction among robots; they’ll no longer be limited to picking and placing objects that have a fixed position. On the downside, that means one with the right AI onboard could figure out how to improvise a garotte. [Geek]