Confinement

How to spell confinement

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce confinement

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does confinement mean?

1. nounThe state of being kept within strict limits or shut in a particular place.
2. nounThe period of late pregnancy and childbirth, when a woman traditionally kept to her room.

Confinement in a sentence

• The prisoner spent three weeks in solitary confinement.

• In the old novel, the expectant mother withdrew for her confinement.

• Weeks of indoor confinement during the lockdown left many people restless.

• The midwife stayed nearby throughout the long confinement.

Where does confinement come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun finis, meaning a 'boundary', 'limit', or 'end', the same root that gives us 'finish', 'finite', and 'define'. From finis came the verb confinare, formed with the prefix con- (an intensive sense here, suggesting being bounded all around), which meant to share a border with or to shut within limits. French developed this into confiner, 'to keep within bounds', and the related noun confinement, which English adopted in the early 1600s. The core image is always of being held inside a fixed boundary, whether that means imprisonment, restriction to a place, or the older medical sense of a woman being kept to her room around childbirth. Remembering the buried word 'fine' (as in finis, an end or limit) helps fix the single -n- and the spelling of the middle of the word.

How the word is built

• con- (together, intensive)
• fin (boundary, end, from Latin finis)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix)