Stake

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stake may refer to:

• Stake: Fortune Fighters, the 2003 Xbox game
• Sudis (stake), field fortification carried by Roman legionaries
• Stake (Mormonism), an administrative unit of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints composed of multiple wards (congregrations)
• In folklore and mythology, a wooden stake, like silver bullets, have special powers to kill monsters via impalement. See vampire, werewolf
• Execution by burning, to ancient Christians, a stake was a pole to which people accused of heresy or witchcraft were tied and "burned at the stake"
• In gambling, a stake is the quantity of money or other goods that is risked on the outcome of some specific event
• A torture stake, a method of execution similar to crucifixion, but involving only a single pole or stake driven into the ground upon which the executed were bound to by nails, rope, or other means. When the person was suspended off the ground with their arms bound above, the weight of their body forces the lungs to remain fully expanded; this forces the person to pull themselves up by their bound hands or push their body up by their legs to take another breath or die from asphyxiation. An execution via this method can take hours to exhaust the executed; sometimes death was hastened by crushing the legs of the impaled or brought about by other means, such as burning the person bound at the stake. Occasionally, some punishments also involved suspending the person upside-down.

Examples of torture stake use

• Most well known as the instrument of execution for people convicted of being witches in medieval Europe and some colonial regions.
• According to the belief of Jehovah's Witnesses, Jesus was impaled on a single-beamed "stake". See article New World Translation, subarticle Rendering of σταυρός (staurós).

  This is opposed to the double-beamed cross or crucifix.

• A stake is a long, pointed object thrust into the ground. Stakes have many applications, such as demarcating a small plot of land, anchoring guy ropes for a tent or other portable structure, or slowly releasing fertilizer to aid the growth of plants
• A stake is a polished iron shape, very firmly mounted, used by silversmiths in the manner of a blacksmith's anvil
• Stake - is also a rock band.
• "Stakes" is the established acronym for the official research bureau of welfare and health in Finland.