Newgate

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A former jail that stood in the City of London and gave its name to a style of criminal biography popular in the 18th and 19th centuries
2. A celebrated and notorious prison that occupied a site near St Paul's Cathedral in medieval and early modern London
3. A famous correctional institution in London, demolished in 1902, known for housing condemned criminals awaiting execution

Etymology: Newgate was one of the great gates of medieval London, and its name is simply the combination "new" and "gate," a plain compound from Middle English. The most striking part of its story is what the name came to stand for. The gate was a city entrance in the old wall, and over time a prison was built on the same site, so the word began to refer to the institution rather than the entrance. Londoners came to use the name for the jail itself, and it became a byword for imprisonment in English writing. The gate and prison were the subject of much public attention, and the name is tied to London's penal history in a way that outlived the buildings. Because the place was so widely known, the word could stand in for the idea of incarceration, and later uses of "Newgate" in English often carry that sense of a grim, punitive institution. The word therefore moved from a literal place name to a general reference for a kind of confinement.