Meaning

verb beat severely with a whip or rod

verb beat with a cane

originFrom Middle English *floggen (suggested by flogge (“hammer, sledge”), from Old English *floggian, a stem variant of Proto-Germanic *flukkōną (“to beat”), itself a secondary zero-grade iterative with unetymological -u-, derived from *flōkaną. The original zero-grade iterative *flakkōną had been misinterpreted as an o-grade. See flack (“to beat”), also as a dialectal noun "a blow, slap". Cognate…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0