coercion

From Old French cohercion, from Latin coercitiō (“magesterial coercion”), from coercere, past participle coercitus (“to restrain, coerce”), from cum (“with”) + arceō (“to shut in, enclose”); see coerce.

• IPA^(key): /koʊˈɝʒən/, /koʊˈɝʃən/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

coercion (countable and uncountable, plural coercions)

1. (not countable) Actual or threatened force for the purpose of compelling action by another person; the act of coercing.
2. (law, not countable) Use of physical or moral force to compel a person to do something, or to abstain from doing something, thereby depriving that person of the exercise of free will.
3. (countable) A specific instance of coercing.
4. (programming, countable) Conversion of a value of one data type to a value of another data type.
5. (linguistics, semantics) The process by which the meaning of a word or other linguistic element is reinterpreted to match the grammatical context.
   • 2008, Oliver Bott, “Doing It Again and Again May Be Difficult, But It Depends on What You Are Doing”, in Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics‎, page 63:

     But often the pieces of information do not fit together and have to be shifted in meaning to confirm with the rest of the sentence. These shifts are called coercion

   • 2016, Susanne Mohr, “From Accra to Nairobi – the use of pluralized mass nouns in East and West African postcolonial Englishes”, in Daniel Schmidt-Brücken, Susanne Schuster, Marina Wienberg, editors, Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics, Berlin: DeGruyter, OCLC 936851687, page 161:

     ...a conversion of mass nouns into count readings according to sorter and portion coercion is only possible if the denotation of a mass noun already comprises minimal parts into which the noun can be subdivided.

• noncoercion

• type coercion

One of three common words ending in -cion, which are coercion, scion, and suspicion.[1][2]

• coercion in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
• “coercion” in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
• coercion in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
• coercion on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

• criocone