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coercion

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: coerción

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Inherited from Middle English cohercioun, from Old French cohercion, from Latin coercitiō (“magisterial coercion”), from past participle coercitus of coerceō (“to restrain, coerce”), from co- (“with”) + arceō (“to shut in, enclose”); see coerce.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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coercion (countable and uncountable, plural coercions)

  1. (uncountable) Actual or threatened force for the purpose of compelling action by another person; the act of coercing.
    • 1947 March 12, Harry S. Truman, 5:24 from the start, in MP72-14 Excerpt - Truman Doctrine Speech‎[1], Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives Identifier: 595162:
      One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion.
  2. (law, uncountable) Use of physical or moral force to compel a person to do something, or to abstain from doing something, thereby depriving that person of the exercise of free will.
  3. (countable) A specific instance of coercing.
  4. (programming, countable) Conversion of a value of one data type to a value of another data type.
  5. (linguistics, semantics) The process by which the meaning of a word or other linguistic element is reinterpreted to match the grammatical context.
    • 2008, Oliver Bott, “Doing It Again and Again May Be Difficult, But It Depends on What You Are Doing”, in Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics‎[2], page 63:
      But often the pieces of information do not fit together and have to be shifted in meaning to confirm with the rest of the sentence. These shifts are called coercion
    • 2016, Susanne Mohr, “From Accra to Nairobi – the use of pluralized mass nouns in East and West African postcolonial Englishes”, in Daniel Schmidt-Brücken, Susanne Schuster, Marina Wienberg, editors, Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics, Berlin: DeGruyter, →OCLC, page 161:
      ...a conversion of mass nouns into count readings according to sorter and portion coercion is only possible if the denotation of a mass noun already comprises minimal parts into which the noun can be subdivided.
  6. (libertarianism) The initiation or threat of conflict; aggression.

Antonyms

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Hyponyms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Trivia

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One of three common words ending in -cion, which are coercion, scion, and suspicion.[1][2]

References

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  1. ^ Notes and Queries, Vol. VI, No. 10, 1889, October, p. 365
  2. ^ Editor and Publisher, Volume 9, 1909, p. 89

Anagrams

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