bracketing

Verb

bracket (third-person singular simple present brackets, present participle bracketing, simple past and past participle bracketed)

1. To support by means of mechanical brackets.
2. To enclose in typographical brackets.
3. To bound on both sides, to surround, as enclosing with brackets.
4. To place in the same category.
   • Because they didn’t have enough young boys for two full teams, they bracketed the seven-year-olds with the eight-year-olds.
5. To mark distinctly for special treatment.
   • Next, since so much social activity is defined by being bracketed out of the world of ongoing events, it becomes possible that outside such bracketed episodes, […] people are — especially beforehand, but also afterwards — to some extent "out of role", and so off their guard.1992, Tom Burns, Erving Goffman, page 292
6. To set aside, discount, ignore.
   • SIL got access to academic legitimacy; linguists bracketed the evangelical engine that drives SIL because they got access to data and tools.2009, Michael Erard, “Holy Grammar, Inc.”, in Search Magazine, July–August 2009

See all 22 meanings of bracket