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/ɔrdˈil/ Listen

Ordeal

noun

A severe or trying experience.

A primitive method of determining a person's guilt or innocence by subjecting the accused person to dangerous or painful tests believed to be under divine control; escape was usually taken as a sign of innocence. Synonym: trial by ordeal.

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"Ordeal" Quotes from Famous Books

... it aloud, on purpose for Belle to hear. I felt like killing her. I might have done it, but one thought restrained me—I should be hung for murder, and I was too bashful to submit to so public an ordeal. ...

— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... bark of the gedu tree, which when ground and mixed with water, makes a poisonous draught, believed to be infallible in the detection of crime. It is, in fact, "a trial by ordeal;" if the drinker survives he is innocent, if he ...

— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... and arbitrary power, sanctions supernatural or 'extra-experimental' beliefs of all kinds. You reject in the case of miracles all the tests applicable to ordinary instruction, and appeal to trial by ordeal instead of listening to witnesses. Instead of taking the trouble to plough and sow, you expect to get a harvest by praying to an inscrutable Being. You marry without means, because you hold that God never sends a child without sending ...

— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... hills with the purple of grape-bloom, and laying a pathway of molten gold across the waters when the Battle Squadrons returned to their bases. A few ships bore traces in blackened paintwork, shell-torn funnels and splintered upperworks, of the ordeal by battle through which they had passed; but their numbers, as they filed in past the shag-haunted cliffs and frowning headlands, were the same as when they swept out in an earlier gloaming to ...

— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... Clifton. The sight of a human face was more than I could bear unless it were the one face; and that I could not hope for. But the desire to see her, to hear from her—if only to learn how she had endured the bitter ordeal of the day before—soon became unbearable. I must know this much at any cost to her ...

— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

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