Word.ws English Dictionary

constraining

constraining is the present participle and gerund of constrain.

Meaning of constrain

Verb

constrain (third-person singular simple present constrains, present participle constraining, simple past and past participle constrained)

  1. (transitive) To force physically, by strong persuasion or pressuring; to compel; to oblige.
  2. (transitive) To keep within close bounds; to confine.
    • But it's not just Castlefield Corridor capacity that constrains services. All the junctions on the lines feeding into the corridor are flat, so they create conflict points as trains pass.2020 January 2, Philip Haigh, “Is there relief to congestion along Castlefield Corridor?”, in Rail, page 23
  3. (transitive) To reduce a result in response to limited resources.

Noun

constraining (plural constrainings)

  1. The act by which something is constrained.
    • In contrast to the (to be sure, productive) shapings and constrainings of human identities in the sociotechnical network, here we have an expansion of identity.1996, Mike Michael, Constructing Identities: The Social, the Nonhuman and Change

Forms of constraining

pluralconstrainings

Questions about constraining

What does constraining mean?
Constraining means the act by which something is constrained.
What is constraining the present participle and gerund of?
Constraining is the present participle and gerund of constrain.
What part of speech is constraining?
Constraining is a noun.
What is the plural of constraining?
The plural of constraining is constrainings.

Words near constraining in the dictionary

  1. constrainedness
  2. constrainer
  3. constrainers
  4. constrainest
  5. constraineth
  6. constraining
  7. constrainingly
  8. constrainings
  9. constrainment
  10. constrainments
  11. constrains

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: constraining (page history and authors); constrain (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “constraining.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/constraining. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.