scrag
To hang on a gallows, or to choke, garotte, or strangle.
obsolete
An enthusiastic mob will scrag me to a certainty the day war breaks out.
To harass; to manhandle.
'...I urged him ... to ... try the Ickenham System ... a little thing I knocked together in my bachelor days ... it has a good many points in common with all-in wrestling and osteopathy. I generally recommend it to diffident wooers and it always works like magic...' Johnny stared. 'You mean you told McMurdo to … scrag her?'
Where it comes from
Perhaps related to Norwegian skragg (a lean person), dialectal Swedish skragge (old and torn thing), Danish skrog (hull, carcass); perhaps related to shrink.
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry scrag (CC BY-SA 4.0).