Word.ws English Dictionary

machine zone

machine zone noun: a trance-like state of immersion reached through intense interaction with gambling machines.

Noun

machine zone (usually uncountable, plural machine zones)

  1. (usually) A trance-like state of immersion reached through intense interaction with gambling machines.
    • Echoing Mollie’s wish to stay in the machine zone, they spoke of gamblers’ desire for “time-on-device,” or TOD.2012, Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design, page 3
    • How does technology hold us close, so close that we turn to it instead of turning within? It keeps us in a “machine zone.”2015, Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin, →ISBN

Forms of machine zone

pluralmachine zones

Origin of machine zone

Coined by cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll.

Questions about machine zone

What does machine zone mean?
Machine zone means a trance-like state of immersion reached through intense interaction with gambling machines.
What part of speech is machine zone?
Machine zone is a noun.
What is the plural of machine zone?
The plural of machine zone is machine zones.

Words near machine zone in the dictionary

  1. machine washed
  2. machine washes
  3. machine washing
  4. machine word
  5. machine words
  6. machine zone
  7. machine zones
  8. machine-gun
  9. machine-gunned
  10. machine-gunner
  11. machine-gunners

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machine zone (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: “machine zone.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/machine_zone. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.