Incarceration

How to spell incarceration

13 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce incarceration

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does incarceration mean?

1. nounThe act of confining someone in prison, or the state of being imprisoned.

Incarceration in a sentence

• The report examined the rising cost of incarceration across the country.

• His incarceration lasted twelve years before the conviction was overturned.

Where does incarceration come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin noun carcer, which literally meant 'prison' or 'an enclosed place'. From it the verb incarcerare was formed, meaning 'to shut up in prison', built with the prefix in- in the sense of 'into'. Medieval Latin passed the verb into legal use, and English took it up in the early seventeenth century, with the noun incarceration following to name the act or condition of being locked away. The same carcer root, surprisingly, also survives in the architectural word 'chancel' through a winding path and is a distant cousin of words for grating and enclosure. The spelling trap lives in the middle: writers must remember the soft -cer- (with a c, not an s) sitting between the doubled-up consonant cluster, which is exactly where the Latin carcer is hiding.

How the word is built

• in- (in, into)
• carcer (prison)
• -ation (noun of action)