arrestation

Noun

arrestation (countable and uncountable, plural arrestations)

1. The act of stopping or slowing something (especially a process).
   • […] he had continued [the treatment] to the day on which I saw him […] with relief of pain and improvement of his general feelings, but without any arrestation of his decline in strength and weight;1847, Thomas Mayo, chapter 3, in Clinical Facts and Reflections, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, page 22
   • We realise that the results of the war are revealed not only in the total of lives lost or wrecked […] but on the ruin of the fabric of Society, […] the arrestation of progress moral and material […]1922, Charles Masterman, chapter 1, in England After War,, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 20

   Synonyms:

   arrest

2. (dated) The act of catching someone's attention.
   • Different hypnotists use different methods of inducing this condition, but the main factor in all of them is the fixation and arrestation of the attention and the use of suggestion.1922, Violet Firth, chapter 22, in The Machinery of the Mind, New York: Dodd, Mead, page 84
3. (dated) The act of arresting someone (taking them into legal custody).
   • […] the arrestation of the English residing in France was decreed by the national convention;1794, Helen Maria Williams, letter dated September 1794 in Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1795, Volume 1, p. 4
   • He was not a German, and could prove it, so that only a short time afterwards he got out of arrest and changed his name. But at that hour I saw in his arrestation, the finger of God, for now there was nobody but me to take the waggons through the country.1937, Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, New York: Random House, published 1938, Part 4, p. 267

   Synonyms:

   arrest