Prisoning

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /ˈpɹɪzənɪŋ/

Definitions

1. The act of putting someone in prison or otherwise restricting their freedom
2. The process of confining a person within guarded or locked premises
3. Holding an individual captive by legal or physical means to limit their liberty

Etymology: "Prisoning" is the present participle and gerund of "prison," so its story is really the story of the root word. The noun "prison" came into Old English as "prisūn," borrowed from Old French "prison," which in turn descends from Latin "prehensiōnem," meaning a seizing or taking, from the verb "prehendere," to grasp. A prison, in other words, was originally named for the act of grabbing someone. The Latin verb is the same one behind "prehension," the capacity to grasp, and that word is a doublet of "prison," meaning the two English words arrived by different routes from the same Latin source. "Prehension" came in later as a learned borrowing, while "prison" was absorbed earlier and worn down through centuries of everyday speech, so that the grip of the original idea survives mainly in the more formal relative.