imprisonment

1. 1.

   putting someone in prison or in jail as lawful punishment

   Broaderpunishment

   law

2. 2.

   the state of being imprisoned

   “he was held in captivity until he died”

   “the imprisonment of captured soldiers”

   “his ignominious incarceration in the local jail”

   “he practiced the immurement of his enemies in the castle dungeon”

   Synonymscaptivityincarcerationimmurement

   Broaderconfinement

   Narrowerdurancelife imprisonmentinternment
3. 3.

   the act of confining someone in a prison (or as if in a prison)

   Synonymsinternment

   Broaderconfinement

   Narrowerlockdownfalse imprisonmentcustody

Other forms of imprisonment

plural

imprisonments·

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.

Questions about imprisonment

What does imprisonment mean?

imprisonment means "putting someone in prison or in jail as lawful punishment". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in imprisonment?

imprisonment has 4 syllables: im-pris-on-ment. The stress falls on "pris". In IPA it is /ˌɪmˈpɹɪzənmənt/.

What is another word for imprisonment?

Close synonyms include captivity, incarceration, immurement, internment. 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 imprisonment a common word?

imprisonment is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.