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say it: sur-kuhm-SKRAHYB
circumscribe is a verb meaning "draw a line around". It carries 3 recorded senses.
restrict or confine within limits
“I limit you to two visits to the pub a day”
“please confine your questions to the topic”
“our actions are circumscribed by our biology, personality, and by the social and cultural context into which we are born”
to draw a geometric figure around another figure so that the two are in contact but do not intersect
geometry
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for circumscribe come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.