1historical A form of punishment or torture in which the victim was secured to a rope and made to fall from a height almost to the ground before being stopped with an abrupt jerk.

‘In Japan, for example, torture was used from a very early date to extract confessions, and from the beginning of the Tokugawa period in the seventeenth century the Japanese seem to have used something very like the strappado.’

More example sentences ‘It is believed that Niccolò Machiavelli was subjected to this form of strappado.’

‘The strappado, also known as the pendulum, was one of the easiest and, therefore, one of the most common torture techniques.’