Ordalía

[poli]

In English, the word ordeal is commonly used to mean a long unpleasant experience. Is ordalía used commonly in Spanish to mean the same thing?

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

Not really. If it's used like that, it would be in a higher register or in literary contexts.

"Ordalía" was a ritual used in Catholic trials, where they "tested" a person by throwing them from heights, subjecting them to burns or other kinds of torture/execution like that, to determine whether they were innocent, and thus saved by God, or guilty of heresy or whatever the Inquisition accused them of.
Currently, the word "ordalía" is used in psychology as a form of therapy, but I don't know exactly how they do it.

Some translations of "ordeal" that may be synonyms of "ordalía" in daily speech could be:
- Sufrimiento
- Calvario
- Suplicio
- Tormento

Some other translations of "ordeal" could be:
- Odisea (Thinking of some "adventure", here in a negative sense)
- Experiencia (Here, normally preceded of a negative adjective like "terrible", "horrible", "traumática", "siniestra", "inolvidable"...)