bloodletting

noun

blood·​let·​ting ˈbləd-ˌle-tiŋ 

1

: phlebotomy

2

: bloodshed

3

: elimination of personnel or resources

4

: severe criticism

Take the English, the undisputed champions at verbal bloodletting.

—Bill Ott

: a harsh verbal or written attack

But what makes "Cinderella & Company" more than just a book-length bloodletting is Hoelterhoff's unexpected sympathy for most of the singers about whom she writes.

—Terry Teachout

Examples of bloodletting in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

That bloodletting is after accounting for the market’s bounce late Monday and into Tuesday. —Brendan Coffey, Sportico.com, 9 Apr. 2025

Both of these aspects set the tone for the raw carnage that would be reproduced in Doom Eternal (2020), a solid sequel that doubled down on the gratuitous bloodletting and amped up the industrial sound of the Doom (2016) OST to a new level. —Kazuma Hashimoto, Rolling Stone, 31 Mar. 2025

Interestingly, this shifting debate over how cognition influences culture coincides with a spate of research bridging psychology and anthropology, which explores why certain behaviors – such as singing lullabies, curative bloodletting and storytelling – recur across human cultures. —Eli Elster, The Conversation, 19 Mar. 2025

For those of us who survived this corporate bloodletting, we were offered bland gestures of perseverance and then told to get back to work the next day. —Steve Denning, Forbes, 27 Feb. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for bloodletting

• abetting
• begetting
• besetting
• briquetting
• forgetting
• offsetting
• pipetting
• regretting
• resetting
• subletting
• typesetting
• upsetting

Kids Definition

bloodletting

noun

blood·​let·​ting ˈbləd-ˌlet-iŋ 

1

: the opening of a vein for the purpose of drawing blood

2

: bloodshed sense 2

Medical Definition

bloodletting

noun

blood·​let·​ting -ˌlet-iŋ 

: phlebotomy