Branks

1. n. A scolding bridle, an instrument formerly used for correcting scolding women. It was an iron frame surrounding the head and having a triangular piece entering the mouth of the scold.
2. n. A sort of bridle with wooden side pieces.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.