Noun

(uncountable) A source of persistent trouble such as pestilence that causes pain and suffering or widespread destruction.

A means to inflict such pain or destruction.

* Shakespeare

What scourge for perjury / Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?

* {{quote-magazine, title=Towards the end of poverty

, date=2013-06-01, volume=407, issue=8838, page=11, magazine=(The Economist) citation , passage=America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 ([…]): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short.}}

A whip, often of leather.

* Chapman

Up to coach then goes / The observed maid, takes both the scourge and reins.

Noun

(stoushes)

(Australia, New Zealand, informal) A fight, an argument.

* 1996 , , Glamour and the Sea , Victoria University Press, New Zealand, page 166,

Barry explained that his friend wasn?t drunk, he?d been in a stoush , had a ding on his head and was covered in money.

* 2006 , Pip Wilson, Faces in the Street: Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Castlereagh Street Push , page 200,

Now Henry knows dead cert he?s in for a stoush , but Snake-hips says he should go with him, and out on Nymagee-street Henry Lawson refuses a twenty-pound note, and the two men shake and Henry accepts the next billiards game, doubles with Snake-hips (who plays even worse than Henry), the Minister for Public Instruction, and the Austrian chappie.

* 2004 , Jay Verney, Percussion , University of Queensland Press, page 151,

She and Anna used to reproduce Veronica?s stoushes with Pat, conducted with gusto over the fence but never brought into the confining space of either house where they might smoulder and flare.

* 2008 , Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 , Fremantle Press, page 63,

Melbourne almost lost the event when union go-slow tactics and a stoush over federal and state funding responsibilities seriously delayed work on the construction of the Olympic Stadium and Village.