• incarcerate •
Pronunciation: in-kahr-sêr-rayt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. Imprison, put in confinement. 2. To shut in as in prison, confine, constrain, lock in.
Notes: Today we have a more formal way of saying imprison. State and federal prisons differ from jails in that they are for long-term incarceration while city and county jails are for shorter terms. Incarceration is the action noun for incarcerate, while incarcerator is the personal noun (notice the O in -or). The rarely used adjective is incarcerate ([in-kahr-sêr-rêt]).
In Play: We may incarcerate people in places other than prisons: "In the Middle Ages wealthy husbands used convents to incarcerate their disobedient wives." This word is also susceptible to metaphoric usage: "Robin Banks's profession incarcerated his fate in Satan's fiery depths."
Word History: Today's Good Word was borrowed from Medieval Latin incarceratus, the past participle of incarcerare "to imprison". The Latin verb is based on carcer "prison, enclosed space", a reduplication of PIE (s)ker-(s)kor- "to turn, bend", also found in Greek kirkos "ring", Latin circus "circle, ring" and curvus "crooked, curved", Russian krivoi "crooked", Serbian kriv "crooked", Lithuanian skrieti "revolve, rotate", and Welsh crych "crease, ripple" and crwn "round, circular". The Germanic languages nasalized the PIE word to come up with Old Germanic hringaz "circle" (PIE [k] regularly became [h] in Proto-Germanic), which ended up in Danish, Dutch, English, Swedish as ring. (Now a word of thanks to Margie Sved, who joined our happy band of logophiles in 2006 for today's rather staid Good Word.)
