public disgrace: the humiliation of being dishonored before others, and the insults and abuse that bring it about.
This word is about a person's standing in the eyes of other people, not a private feeling of guilt. It names the loss of honor that happens out in the open, before family, enemies, or the whole community. In a world where public honor was one of a person's most valuable possessions, being disgraced this way was among the heaviest things anyone could suffer, which is why it fills the prayers of people begging God to rescue them from it.
The word covers two closely tied shades. One is the disgraced condition itself, the humiliation a person or a nation carries or is covered with, the way clothing covers a body. The other is the insult that inflicts it: the taunt, the mocking, the physical abuse like spitting that is meant to shame someone in front of others. The first is the state; the second is the act that produces it. They belong together because both are about honor stripped away in public.
It appears most often in two settings. In the Psalms it is what enemies try to pour on the person praying, turning their honor into disgrace, and what the sufferer asks God to turn back on those enemies instead. In Ezekiel it becomes almost a refrain: the nations must bear their disgrace, and God promises that his people will no longer have to carry the shame heaped on them by the surrounding nations. The Bible often pairs it with the ordinary word for shame to drive the point home.