clamp down

1. 1.

   repress or suppress (something regarded as undesirable)

   “The police clamped down on illegal drugs”

   Synonymscrack down

   Broaderrestrict

Questions about clamp down

What does clamp down mean?

clamp down means "repress or suppress (something regarded as undesirable)".

What is another word for clamp down?

Close synonyms include crack down. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is clamp down a common word?

clamp down is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.