bloodbath, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈblʌdbɑːθ/, /ˈblʌdbaθ/, U.S. /ˈblədˌbæθ/
Forms: see blood n. and bath n.1
Etymology: < blood n. + bath n.1 Compare Dutch bloedbad massacre (1625), German Blutbad bloodshed, massacre (1699 or earlier), Swedish blodbad (1582 in senses ‘bath in blood’ and ‘massacre’), Danish blodbad massacre (1732–5), bath in blood (1904).
1.
a. A battle or fight at which much blood is spilt; a wholesale slaughter, a massacre.
1814 R. Jamieson tr. Stark Tiderich & Olger Danske in Illustr. Northern Antiq. 272 There lay the steed; here lay the man; Gude friends that day did twin [= part]: They leuch [= laughed] na a' to the feast that cam Whan the het bluid-bath was done.
1832 T. Carlyle in Fraser's Mag. May 407/1 England has escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution.
1919 F. G. Tuttle Women & World Federaion ix. 148 It may be that we are still too near the bloodbath of nations to see clearly and estimate the organic social change correctly.
1956 Washington Post 19 Nov. a21/1 Even today, after the unspeakable horror of the blood bath in Hungary, the betting is still somewhat against a ‘re-Stalinization’.
1983 Times 30 Mar. 7/2 Assamese leaders have declared today a day of mourning for those killed in the Assam bloodbath.
2005 Vanity Fair(N.Y.) Dec. 204 Evangelical Christians are ‘raptured’ up to heaven, leaving secular humanists to perish in an epic bloodbath.
b. Chiefly Sport. A very violent or aggressive confrontation or contest.
1951 T. Cohane Yale Football Story vii. 93 The Hampden Park blood bath of '94 caused Yale and Harvard to break off football relations for the next two years.
1980 Globe & Mail(Toronto) (Nexis) 23 Feb., A lacrosse game between the United States and Canada turned into an anything-goes bloodbath.
1992 G. M. Fraser Quartered Safe out Here 35 The tough, black-browed colonel to whom I never spoke until he warned me for a late tackle in a bloodbath of a Cumberland Rugby Cup match after the war.
2009 Knoxville(Tennessee)News-Sentinel (Nexis) 11 Nov., I don't want to have a blood bath..of two friends fighting each other.
c. A dramatic loss or heavy defeat; spec. (Business) an instance of large financial losses or mass redundancy brought about by adverse economic conditions.
1967 Wall St. Jrnl. 27 Feb. 22 The present abundance of beef has caused a speculative ‘bloodbath’ since last fall.
1989 Jet 24 Apr. 9/1 In an interview after the victory, Daley sought to assure Blacks that there would be no personnel bloodbath at City Hall.
1994 Evening Standard (Nexis) 9 Nov. 9 His people did badly everywhere—and atrociously in the South, where the Democrats endured a bloodbath in a region they used to monopolise.
1996 Guardian 21 Sept. b7/3 Many British managers..seem to regard the occasional bloodbath among their employees as a necessary part of the job.
2011 M. Heffernan Wilful Blindness iii. 60 Greenspan's Fed raised the rate another half percent—and there was a bloodbath on Wall Street.
2. A bath in warm blood taken as a tonic or form of medical treatment
1834 London Med. Gaz. 22 Feb. 813 (heading) On blood-baths... According to a dark tradition,..the ancient kings of Egypt used to bathe in human blood when they were seized with leprosy.
1895 Cincinnati Med. Jrnl. May 380/2 Although French doctors do not often prescribe these forms of treatment, ‘blood baths’ are not infrequently used.
1916 Trans. Amer. Climatol. & Clin. Assoc. 32 32 Blood baths, said to be used by the Sicilians in the treatment of leprosy.
1988 New Scientist 24 Dec. 24/2 Until medieval times, a blood bath was considered an effective cure for leprosy.
2003 Independent (Nexis) 20 June 12 I've travelled all the way down from Moscow to take a blood bath... I've consulted many doctors about my back pain, but this bath is the only thing that helps.
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