overpunishv.
/ˌəʊvəˈpʌnɪʃ/, U.S. /ˌoʊvərˈpənɪʃ/ transitive. To punish excessively or more than is deserved.
ΘΚΠ
society > authority > punishment > [verb (transitive)] > severely
visita1382
to-punisha1400
overpunisha1639
to give (a person) hell1836
to give a person what for1852
slate1854
to give it in the neck1881
to come down1888
bean1910
scrub1911
cane1925
to gie (or give) (someone) laldy1935
a1639 W. Whately Prototypes (1640) i. xix. 224 For his inferiours he is likely tyrannical..and cares not how he overpunisheth them.
1823 T. De Quincey Lett. Young Man in London Mag. Jan. 86/1 The evil..is..over-punished by the mortifications which attend, any such juvenile acts of presumption.
1878 Scribner's Monthly 16 747 The cruelty of the captains and officers, who take advantage of their despotic positions at sea to overpunish their men.
1902 A. Eliot Charities in M. E. Richmond Social Diagnosis (1917) 182 He understood his wife's pliable nature well enough to forgive her entirely for having overpunished him.
1950 M. W. Smith Fighting with Property vi. 128 Certainly the Kwakiutl were overpunished for any violence that occured and certainly they soon gave up their warfare.
1995 R. J. Carroll Econ. Rec. Presidential Performance 202 Not to account for this characteristic would be to overreward the president who recorded the 49 percent trend improvement and to overpunish the president with the -49.1 percent trend decline.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, December 2004; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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