enclosure

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English

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Alternative forms

  • inclosure (was as common as or more common until the early 1800s; now uncommon)

Etymology

From Middle English enclosure, from Old French enclosure, from enclore, from Latin inclūdere, inclūdō, from in- (“in”) + claudō (“to shut”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kleh₂u- (“key, hook, nail”). Alike to inclusion.

Pronunciation

Noun

enclosure (countable and uncountable, plural enclosures)

  1. (countable) Something that is enclosed, i.e. inserted into a letter or similar package.
    There was an enclosure with the letter — a photo.
  2. (uncountable) The act of enclosing, i.e. the insertion or inclusion of an item in a letter or package.
    The enclosure of a photo with your letter is appreciated.
  3. (countable) An area, domain, or amount of something partially or entirely enclosed by barriers.
    He faced punishment for creating the fenced enclosure in a public park.
    The glass enclosure holds the mercury vapor.
    The winning horse was first into the unsaddling enclosure.
    • 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, , →OCLC, part I, page 199:
      And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures.
    • 1989, Octavia E. Butler, “Part III, Chapter 7”, in Imago, page 210:
      Away from the village, there was an enclosure containing several large animals of a kind I had not seen before—shaggy, long-necked, small-headed creatures who stood or lay at ease around their pen. Alpacas?
  4. (uncountable) The act of separating and surrounding an area, domain, or amount of something with a barrier.
    The enclosure of public land is against the law.
    The experiment requires the enclosure of mercury vapor in a glass tube.
    At first, untrained horses resist enclosure.
  5. (uncountable, by extension) The act of restricting access to ideas, works of art or technologies using patents or intellectual property laws.
    • 2014, Astra Taylor, chapter 5, in The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN:
      Copyright, from day one, was designed to be both an impediment and an incentive, a mechanism of enclosure (one that prevented the unlicensed printing of texts, thereby limiting access) and a catalyst of sorts, a structure to stimulate the production of literary goods by rewarding writers and publishers for their labor.
    • 2019, Robert Stam, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media‎, Routledge, →ISBN:
      The commons evokes resistance to “enclosure” in all its forms, whether in its early proto-capitalist form of fencing in commonly shared land, or in its contemporary forms of marshalling judicial restraints such as “patent” and “intellectual property” to police the ownership of ideas.
  6. (uncountable, British History) The post-feudal process of subdivision of common lands for individual ownership.
    Strip-farming disappeared after enclosure.
  7. (religion) The area of a convent, monastery, etc where access is restricted to community members.

Usage notes

  • For more on the spelling of this word, see enclose.

Derived terms

Translations

post-feudal process of subdivision of common lands for individual ownership
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

Anagrams

Old French

Alternative forms

Etymology

enclos-, stem of enclore +‎ -ure.

Noun

enclosure oblique singular, f (oblique plural enclosures, nominative singular enclosure, nominative plural enclosures)

  1. enclosure (act of enclosing something)
  2. enclosure (enclosed area)

References

Wikious
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Sagapedia