flagellant
noun, adjective
flagellant is a noun meaning “a person who whips themselves or others either as part of a religious penance or for sexual gratification” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-L-A-G-E-L-L-A-N-T, and it appears about once in every 56 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of flagellant is flagellants.
What does flagellant mean?
noun
- 1
a person who whips themselves or others either as part of a religious penance or for sexual gratification.
adjective
- 1
Given to flagellation.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce flagellant?
- UK
- US
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-uk-flagellant.ogg, En-us-flagellant.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of flagellant
- flagellants plural
- more flagellant comparative
- most flagellant superlative
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is flagellant?
Flagellant appears about once in every 56 million words in written English, the 234,209th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Flagellant in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense one who practices self-flagellation:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| Spanish | flagelante |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does flagellant come from?
From Latin flagellāns, present participle of flagellāre (“to whip”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).