trammel

From Old French tramail (“net for catching fish”), from Late Latin tremaculum.

• Rhymes: -æməl

trammel (plural trammels)

1. Whatever impedes activity, progress, or freedom, such as a net or shackle.
   • (Can we date this quote?) Jeffrey

     [They] disdain the trammels of any sordid contract.

   • 1898, William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, in War and Other Essays, Yale, published 1911, page 332:

     The men who came here were able to throw off all the trammels of tradition and established doctrine.

2. A fishing net that has large mesh at the edges and smaller mesh in the middle
3. A kind of net for catching birds, fishes, or other prey.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Carew to this entry?)

4. A set of rings or other hanging devices, attached to a transverse bar suspended over a fire, used to hang cooking pots etc.
5. A net for confining a woman's hair.
   • (Can we find and add a quotation of Spenser to this entry?)
6. A kind of shackle used for regulating the motions of a horse and making him amble.
7. (engineering) An instrument for drawing ellipses, one part of which consists of a cross with two grooves at right angles to each other, the other being a beam carrying two pins (which slide in those grooves), and also the describing pencil.
8. A beam compass

trammel (third-person singular simple present trammels, present participle (UK) trammelling or (US) trammeling, simple past and past participle (UK) trammelled or (US) trammeled)

1. To entangle, as in a net.
   • 1880 Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lines 9-10

     the scarce-snatched hours

     Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers: —

     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars.

2. (transitive) To confine; to hamper; to shackle.
   • 1948, Winston Churchill, The Second World War

     Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.

• Lammert