punish

Etymology

From Middle English punischen, from Anglo-Norman, Old French puniss-, stem of some of the conjugated forms of punir, from Latin puniō (“I inflict punishment upon”), from poena (“punishment, penalty”); see pain. Displaced Old English wītnian and (mostly, in this sense) wrecan.

verb

1. (transitive) To cause to suffer for crime or misconduct, to administer disciplinary action.
   If a prince violates the law, then he must be punished like an ordinary person.
   It was not from the want of proper laws that dangerous principles had been disseminated, and had assumed a threatening aspect, but because those laws had not been employed by the executive power to remedy the evil, and to punish the offenders. 1818, William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, page 255
   The law needs to punish this behaviour as a deterrent to others. 2007, Matthew Weait, Intimacy and Responsibility: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission, Routledge, page 80
   His mother had punished him when he'd deserved it. She'd loved him, he was “all she had,” but she'd punished him, too. 2017, Joyce Carol Oates, Double Delight, Open Road Media
2. (transitive, figurative) To treat harshly and unfairly.
   But each effort that Anna makes —and she has attempted many— meets with obstacles from a welfare bureaucracy that punishes single mothers for initiative and partial economic self-sufficiency. 1994, Valerie Polakow, Lives on the Edge: Single Mothers and Their Children in the Other America, University of Chicago Press, page 68
   Homer, moreover, gives the impression that the Sun punished Odysseus's men; but we are later told that the Sun cannot punish individual men […] 2008, Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, page 5
   The rider who comes back on his horse in mid-air over a fence is punishing his horse severely. 2009, Gordon Wright, Learning to Ride, Hunt, and Show, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., page 44
3. (transitive, colloquial) To handle or beat severely; to maul.
4. (transitive, colloquial) To consume a large quantity of.
   A few moments later, we were all sitting around the veranda of the hunters' dining hall, punishing the gin, as usual. 1970, Doc Greene, The Memory Collector, page 49