Excoriate, which first appeared in English in the 15th century, comes from "excoriatus," the past participle of the Late Latin verb excoriare, meaning "to strip off the hide." "Excoriare" was itself formed from a pairing of the Latin prefix ex-, meaning "out," and corium, meaning "skin" or "hide" or "leather." "Corium" has several other descendants in English. One is "cuirass," a name for a piece of armor that covers the body from neck to waist (or something, such as bony plates covering an animal, that resembles such armor). Another is "corium" itself, which is sometimes used as a synonym of "dermis" (the inner layer of human skin).
He was excoriated as a racist.
The candidates have publicly excoriated each other throughout the campaign.
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Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky excoriated the White House and President Donald Trump on Wednesday after saying he and his family had been disinvited from the annual White House picnic.—Sonam Sheth, MSNBC Newsweek, 12 June 2025 Other journalists had excoriated McCarthy earlier, in print and on the radio, but Murrow met the medium and the moment in 1954, demonstrating the senator’s smear tactics and stirring a severe public backlash.—Brian Stelter, CNN Money, 6 June 2025 On May 30, 2025, a Pennsylvania federal court refused NFL player agent Todd France’s request to vacate a December 2023 arbitration decision which ordered France to pay over $800,000 in damages to rival agent Jason Bernstein and which excoriated France for fraudulent conduct.—Chris Deubert, Forbes.com, 31 May 2025 This group certainly deserves to be excoriated; Tapper and Thompson marshal lots of evidence that Biden was even worse behind the scenes than in public, and those closest to the president tightly restricted access to him to obscure the problem.—Michelle Goldberg, Mercury News, 17 May 2025 See All Example Sentences for excoriate
Word History
Etymology
Middle English, from Late Latin excoriatus, past participle of excoriare, from Latin ex- + corium skin, hide — more at cuirass
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