straitjacket
/ˈstɹeɪtˌd͡ʒækɪt/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.38 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.
noun
Any situation seen as confining or restricting.
verb
To restrict the freedom of someone or something, either physically or psychologically.
Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "There’s a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets."
- "our ever-increasing bureaucratic straitjacket of regulations"
- "[I]f we remain in one discipline, we remain in a straitjacket; an adequate theory of language evolution requires a lot of interdisciplinary work."
- "What he asked himself now was,—could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketted even, muffled in a padded room?"
- "Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding?"
- "Encouraging, allowing for, and maintaining a plurality of viewpoints concerning public policy, for instance, adaptively (even though partially and incompletely) reduces the chances of a rigidly deterministic and reductionistic mindset maladaptively straitjacketting our abilities to deal with dynamic complexity and to appreciate the benefits of malleability and self-criticality in remaining open to the challenges of our environment."
Etymology
Etymology tree English strait Old French jaque Proto-Indo-European *-tós Proto-Italic *-tosder.? Late Latin -ittus Old French -et Middle French jacquetbor. English jacket English straitjacket From strait (“restrictive”) + jacket.