jail
English
Alternative forms
- gaol (UK, Australia, Ireland)
Etymology
From Middle English gayole, gaylle, gaille, gayle, gaile, via Old French gaiole, gayolle, gaole, from Medieval Latin gabiola, for Vulgar Latin *caveola, a diminutive of Latin cavea (“cavity, coop, cage”). See also cage.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /dʒeɪl/
Audio (US) (file) - Rhymes: -eɪl
Noun
jail (countable and uncountable, plural jails)
- A place or institution for the confinement of persons held in lawful custody or detention, especially for minor offenses or with reference to some future judicial proceeding.
- 1966, Robert Coover, “Part II, section 11”, in The Origin of the Brunists, first edition, page 218:
- Taking a shower at the high school, Tommy (the Kitten) Cavanaugh kids Ugly Palmers. "Ugly, if you think the world is coming to an end," he says, "what are you wasting your time here at this jail for? You gonna need American history up there?"
- 2015 June 7, John Oliver, “Bail”, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 2, episode 16, HBO:
- “I’m out!” That, of course, is an excerpt from Robert Durst’s children’s books [sic], Goodbye Jail. “Goodbye money. Goodbye bail. I killed them all, but goodbye jail. Of course! Of course!”
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- (uncountable) Confinement in a jail.
- (horse racing) The condition created by the requirement that a horse claimed in a claiming race not be run at another track for some period of time (usually 30 days).
- In dodgeball and related games, the area where players who have been struck by the ball are confined.
- (computing, FreeBSD) A kind of sandbox for running a guest operating system instance.
Usage notes
- (place of confinement): Like many nouns denoting places where people spend time, jail requires no article after certain prepositions: hence in jail (“detained in a jail”), go to jail (“become detained in a jail”), and so on. The forms in a jail, go to a jail, and so on do exist, but tend to imply mere presence in the jail, rather than detention there.
- Until Monopoly popularised the spelling jail in the UK and Australia, gaol was the standard spelling in these countries.
Hypernyms
- (place of confinement): correctional facility, correctional institution
Derived terms
Terms derived from jail
- jail fodder
- jailhouse
- jail purse
- jail sentence
- jailtime
Translations
place for short-term confinement
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confinement
horse racing: condition of not being able to run at another track for some period of time
Verb
jail (third-person singular simple present jails, present participle jailing, simple past and past participle jailed)
- To imprison.
- 2013 August 10, “Can China clean up fast enough?”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848:
- It has jailed environmental activists and is planning to limit the power of judicial oversight by handing a state-approved body a monopoly over bringing environmental lawsuits.
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Synonyms
Translations
imprison — see imprison
Anagrams
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