jail

English Online Dictionary. What means jail‎? What does jail mean?

English

Alternative forms

• gaol (British, Australia, Ireland, dated)

Etymology

From Middle English gayole, gaylle, gaille, gayle, gaile, via Old French gaiole, gayolle, gaole, from Medieval Latin gabiola, for Late Latin caveola, a diminutive of Latin cavea (“cavity, coop, cage”). Doublet of caveola and related to cage. More at cajole.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /d͡ʒeɪ(ə)l/
• Rhymes: -eɪl

Noun

jail (countable and uncountable, plural jails)

1. A place or institution for the confinement of persons held against their will in lawful custody or detention, especially (in US usage) a place where people are held for minor offenses or with reference to some future judicial proceeding.

   Synonyms: slammer, hoosegow

   Coordinate terms: big house, prison

   Hypernyms: correctional facility, correctional institution
2. (uncountable) Confinement in a jail.
3. (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).
4. In dodgeball and related games, the area where players who have been struck by the ball are confined.
5. (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. Compare also in the hoosegow/slammer.
• Until Monopoly popularised the spelling jail in the UK and Australia, gaol was the standard spelling in these countries.
• In the United States, there is a formal distinction between the terms jail and prison – the former refers to facilities run by local governments, the later refers to facilities run by the state and federal governments; however, this distinction is not always observed in informal usage. By contrast, in most of the rest of the English-speaking world, the two terms are synonymous.

Derived terms

Descendants

• → Hindustani:
  • Hindi: जेल (jel)
  • Urdu: جیل‎ (jel)
• → Punjabi: ਜੇਲ੍ਹ (jelh)
• → Welsh: jêl, jael

Translations

Verb

jail (third-person singular simple present jails, present participle jailing, simple past and past participle jailed)

1. To imprison.

Synonyms

• imprison
• incarcerate

Translations

Anagrams

• jali