say it: uh-PRESH-uhn
oppression is a noun meaning "the act of subjugating by cruelty". It carries 3 recorded senses.
the act of subjugating by cruelty
“the tyrant's oppression of the people”
the state of being kept down by unjust use of force or authority: "after years of oppression they finally revolted"
a feeling of being oppressed
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 oppression 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.