beheadment

In word games, the ability to form words by removing the initial letter.

However, the ordinary beheadment, as this phenomenon is called, is so widespread that it creates little interest. There are beheadments, though, which do have some sort of distinction. For instance, both the words concerned may have approximately the same meaning. Thus, ALONE and LONE both mean ‘solitary’.

A famous story about a beheadment concerns a university professor who put up a notice that he ‘would meet his classes tomorrow’. Some joker beheaded ‘classes’ and made it into ‘lasses’, but the professor then got his own back by deleting the ‘I’.

Synonym of beheading.

The chairs in this room are covered with tapestry work, said to be portions of the cloak worn by King Charles at the time of his beheadment.

[…] the execution by beheadment taking place almost immediately.