procrustean bed
procrustean bed noun: an arbitrary standard, especially one that is forced upon people for the sake of conformity and involves the sacrifice of what is useful.
Noun (1)
procrustean bed (plural procrustean beds)
- An arbitrary standard, especially one that is forced upon people for the sake of conformity and involves the sacrifice of what is useful.
- Merely to jingle common-place ideas in rhyme, may be easy enough; but to make fine sense, animated and appropriate description, and beautiful imagery, recline gracefully on that Procrustean bed, is about as easy as to compose music like Handel or Hedyen, and to paint like Reynolds, Romney, and...1787, Anna Seward, letter to Francis Noel Clarke Mundy dated 10 October, 1787, in Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1811, Volume 1, p. 342
- And now began the real wrong-doing of the Trades’ Unions. As to their decision to work, or not, at such a particular rate of wages, that was either wise or unwise; all error of judgment at the worst. But they had no right to tyrannise over others, and tie them down to their own procrustean bed.1848, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 15, in Mary Barton, volume 1, London: Chapman and Hall, page 271
Noun (2) capitalized: Procrustean Bed
Procrustean Bed (plural Procrustean Beds)
- Alternative letter-case form of procrustean bed.
- The reductionist tendencies and impulses of Jaynes's approach tend to turn history into a Procrustean Bed; the body is mangled to fit the theory.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 269
Noun (3) capitalized: Procrustean bed
Procrustean bed (plural Procrustean beds)
- Alternative letter-case form of procrustean bed.
Examples of procrustean bed in a sentence
- Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages.1901 [1887], Robert Louis Stevenson, chapter IV, in Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons:
- The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality.1947, Felix Frankfurter, New York v. United States, 331 U.S. 284, 353 (dissenting)
- […] but, as the authors had hinted in their discussion of Germany in the Manifesto, that such a conception is not a procrustean bed into which complex reality must be shoved.2022, China Miéville, chapter 3, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:
Forms of procrustean bed
| plural | procrustean beds |
|---|---|
| alternative form | Procrustean bed |
| alternative form | Procrustean Bed |
| plural | Procrustean Beds |
| plural | Procrustean beds |
Origin of procrustean bed
From the Greek myth about Procrustes, who assaulted people to make their body height conform to the length of a particular iron bed; see details at Wikipedia.
Questions about procrustean bed
- What does procrustean bed mean?
- Procrustean bed means an arbitrary standard, especially one that is forced upon people for the sake of conformity and involves the sacrifice of what is useful.
- How do you use procrustean bed in a sentence?
- Iron-bound, impersonal ethics, the procrustean bed of rules, he soon saw at their true value as the deification of averages.
- What part of speech is procrustean bed?
- Procrustean bed is a noun.
- What is the plural of procrustean bed?
- The plural of procrustean bed is procrustean beds.
Words near procrustean bed in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: procrustean bed (page history and authors); Procrustean Bed (page history and authors); Procrustean bed (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: “procrustean bed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/procrustean_bed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.