To bully, to persecute. Originally nautical.
1840. Every shifting of the studding-sails was only to “haze” the crew. (Note) Haze is a word of frequent use on board ship, and never, I believe, used elsewhere. It is very expressive to a sailor, and means to punish by hard work. Let an officer once say, “I’ll haze you,” and your fate is fixed. You will be “worked up,” if you are not a better man than he is.—R. H. Dana, Jr., ‘Two Years before the Mast,’ ch. viii., p. 63. (Italics in the original.)
1846. The surest way to render a man worthless and indifferent to the success of the voyage is to haze him, and find fault with him when he does his duty to the best of his ability.—J. Ross Browne, ‘A Whaling Cruise,’ p. 190 (Bartlett). (Italics in the original.)
1850. Mack was very dull at learning any thing connected with seacraft, and made rather a clumsy sailor. The captain disliked him on this account, and continually hazed him for his awkwardness.—Id., p. 187 (Bartlett). (Italics in the original.)
1850. ’T is the Sophomores rushing the Freshmen to haze.—Poem before Iadma, p. 22, in Hall, ‘College Words,’ p. 251 (1856). (N.E.D.)
1863. The paltry and laborious folly of stealing gates and signs is of this sort, totally inexcusable and unworthy of any man of honor. The crime of “hazing” Freshmen is also of this kind.—Yale Lit. Mag., xxviii. 290 (July).
1888. Did you not hear that he had been hazed?… He told me that a company of students disguised had come into his room late at night, that they gagged his mouth lest he should cry and his ears lest he should identify them; that they had shaved his head, then put him under the pump, and left him tied on the campus.—James McCosh, ‘Twenty Years of Princeton College,’ June 20.
1869. Some Sophs tried to haze one of our men, and we had a little scrimmage.—W. T. Washburn, ‘Fair Harvard,’ p. 15 (N.Y.). See also pp. 31, 35, 49, 59.
1888. The petty bullying or hazing, and the whole system of college tyranny, is a most contemptible denial of fair play…. The meanest and most cowardly fellows in college may shine most in hazing.… The hazers in college are the men who have been bred upon dime-novels and the prize-ring, in spirit at least, if not in fact.—George W. Curtis in Harper’s Monthly, lxxvi. 635–6.
1889. He [a recruit in the army] stood in much the same relation to the veterans of his company that a Freshman in college does to the Sophomores, or did when hazing was the rule and not the exception.—J. D. Billings, ‘Hardtack and Coffee,’ p. 202 (Boston).
1910. One cadet, now a major of infantry, drove off his tormentors by sending a bullet through an assailant’s leg. Hazing was never attempted again in his case.—N.Y. Evening Post, March 17.
