straitjacket
/ˈstɹeɪtˌd͡ʒækɪt/
straitjacket noun: a jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.
Noun
straitjacket (plural straitjackets)
- A jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.
- There’s a couple of people actually wearing duct-tape straitjackets.1992, Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, page 243
- Synonyms:
- straitwaistcoat
- Any situation seen as confining or restricting.
- our ever-increasing bureaucratic straitjacket of regulations
- [I]f we remain in one discipline, we remain in a straitjacket; an adequate theory of language evolution requires a lot of interdisciplinary work.2009, Michael Giffin, Quadrant, November 2009, No. 461 (Volume LIII, Number 11), Quadrant Magazine Limited, page 99
Verb
straitjacket (third-person singular simple present straitjackets, present participle straitjacketing, simple past and past participle straitjacketed)
- To put someone into a straitjacket.
- What he asked himself now was,—could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketted even, muffled in a padded room?1948, Henry Green [pseudonym; Henry Vincent Yorke], [chapter 1], in Concluding: A Novel, New York, N.Y.: The Viking Press, published 1950, →OCLC, page 11
- Synonyms:
- jacket
- To restrict the freedom of someone or something, either physically or psychologically.
- Charles for five whole days in a Victorian topper and tailcoat when he practically had to be straitjacketted to get him into tails for a three-hour wedding?1977, Doreen Tovey, chapter 4, in The Coming of Saska (Feline Frolics; 7), Chichester, West Sussex: Summersdale Publishers, published 2007, →ISBN, page 42
- Encouraging, allowing for, and maintaining a plurality of viewpoints concerning public policy, for instance, adaptively (even though partially and incompletely) reduces the chances of a rigidly deterministic and reductionistic mindset maladaptively straitjacketting our abilities to deal with...1994, Ian T[revor] King, “Politics, Economics, and Democracy”, in Explorations Beyond the Machine: A Philosophy of Social Science for the Post-Newtonian Age (Mamardashvili Series on Philosophy...
Examples of straitjacket in a sentence
- It was deeply antagonistic to research on human remains, and recommended straitjacketing archaeological research within the same framework as medical science.2004 October 31, Robert Foley, “The Flores remains could have been lost to science”, in The Observer, →ISSN, archived from the original on...
- she couldnʼt wait to go to college, have a career and leave her parentsʼ straitjacketed lives behind2019, Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin Books (2020), page 280:
- A Labour opposition that has straitjacketed its pledges and ambitions with its fears of blowing its strongest chance in years to gain power.2023 August 7, Nesrine Malik, “British people are kinder and less divided than politicians give us credit for”, in The Guardian, archived...
Synonyms of straitjacket
Forms of straitjacket
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | straitjackets |
| alternative form | strait jacket |
| alternative form | strait-jacket |
| alternative form | straightjacket |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | straitjackets |
| present participle | straitjacketing |
| past participle | straitjacketed |
| past | straitjacketed |
Origin of straitjacket
From strait (“restrictive”) + jacket.
Questions about straitjacket
- What does straitjacket mean?
- Straitjacket means a jacketlike garment with very long sleeves which can be secured in place, thus preventing the wearer from moving their arms; often used in psychiatric hospitals to prevent patients from injuring themselves or others.
- How do you use straitjacket in a sentence?
- It was deeply antagonistic to research on human remains, and recommended straitjacketing archaeological research within the same framework as medical science.
- What part of speech is straitjacket?
- Straitjacket can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce straitjacket?
- Straitjacket is pronounced /ˈstɹeɪtˌd͡ʒækɪt/.
- What is the plural of straitjacket?
- The plural of straitjacket is straitjackets.
Words near straitjacket in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: straitjacket (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-straitjacket.ogg.
Cite this entry: “straitjacket.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/straitjacket. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.