Girdled

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Definitions

1. Surrounded or enclosed by a restraining band or encircling material
2. Confined or secured by a circular object that wraps around something
3. Wrapped or encompassed by a band that forms a complete circle around an object

Etymology: "Girdled" is the past tense and past participle of "girdle," so it describes something that has had a band passed around it. The verb goes back to Old English "gyrdel," a belt or sash, and that noun is built from "gird," meaning to fasten something around the body, with the suffix "-le" added to name the thing that does the fastening. The noun's roots run deep in Germanic speech: Dutch "gordel," German "Gürtel," Swedish "gördel," and Icelandic "gyrðill" all mean belt or girdle, pointing back to a shared ancestor. The word also has a near-twin in Yiddish, "gartl," meaning belt, which came into English as "gartel," a doublet of "girdle." Both descend from the same Germanic source but reached English along different routes, so one ended up as a formal term for a garment or a ring and the other as a more everyday word for a belt.

Synonyms: encircled, belted, surrounded, bound, wrapped

Antonyms: unbound, released, uncovered, freed, loosed