pleyt

From Middle Dutch pleyt (“flat”). Doublet of flat and plat.

pleyt (plural pleyts)

1. (nautical, archaic) A riverboat.
   • 1954, Nelly Johanna Martina Kerling, Commercial Relations of Holland and Zeeland with England from the Late 13th Century to the Close of the Middle Ages:

     In the second group a variety of ships may be placed: a boeyer, a pleyt, a krayer, an ever, a cogge, a bark, a hulk, and from the middle of the 15th century onwards a carvel.

   • 2011, Money and Beauty‎, Giunti Editore, →ISBN, page 186:

     The model on display belongs to the family of the "pleyt" or "pleitscip"."

• “pleyt”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

Borrowed from Russian плеть (pletʹ, “whip, lash”).

pleyt (plural pleyts)

1. (historical) A whip, as an instrument of punishment or torture in Russia.
   • 1896, Edward Arthur Brayley Hodgetts, Round about Armenia: The Record of a Journey Across the Balkans Through Turkey, the Caucasus, and Persia in 1895:

     In Russia, the pleyt is a terrible form of punishment, which is still, I believe, administered in rare instances in Siberia. It is not ten years ago that a woman was flogged to death in Siberia.

   • 1908, Edward Arthur Brayley Hodgetts, The Court of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, volume 1, page 138:

     In 1836, near the town of Krasnophinsk, in the province of Perm, a man, about sixty years of age, was arrested as a vagrant. He received twenty blows with the pleyt or knout, and was sent to Siberia.

   • 1914, Edward Arthur Brayley Hodgetts, The Life of Catherine the Great of Russia:

     The lady was publicly knouted (flogged with an instrument of torture called a pleyt), had her tongue cut out, flung, a piece of quivering and bleeding flesh, on a cart, and banished to Siberia.

• Pytel, yelpt