Detain

How to spell detain

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce detain

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does detain mean?

1. verbTo keep someone in official custody, or to delay or hold someone up.

Detain in a sentence

• The police can detain a suspect for questioning.

• A long meeting may detain her at the office past six.

Where does detain come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This verb traces back to the Latin detinere, which combined the prefix de-, meaning 'away' or 'off', with tenere, meaning 'to hold'. The literal sense was therefore 'to hold off' or 'to keep back', and the same tenere root quietly powers a whole family of English words including 'retain', 'contain', 'sustain', and 'tenant'. English took the word in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries through Old French detenir, and the modern spelling settled on -tain rather than the French -tenir, matching its cousins retain and contain. Early uses covered both the idea of keeping a person against their will and the gentler sense of holding someone up or delaying them. That doubled meaning survives today, and the steady -tain ending is the spelling cue worth fixing in memory, since the vowel is the unstressed part people tend to second-guess.

How the word is built

• de- (away, off)
• -tain (from Latin tenere: to hold)