asylum - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Latin asylum, from Ancient Greek ἄσυλον (ásulon).

asylum (countable and uncountable, plural asylums or asyla)

  1. A place of safety or refuge.
    • 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XXVIII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume II, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 295:
      All the busy concerns of daily existence were utterly abhorrent to me. I loathed the sound of others' voices—I hated to be mixed up with their petty routine of ordinary cares; here was an asylum offered to me—here I might lay down all the offices of humanity, and dwell beside that grave whose rest was now my only desire.
  2. (uncountable) The protection, physical and legal, afforded by such a place (as, for example, for political refugees).
    • 2020 August 5, Francesca Spinelli, “Meet David: born in France, raised in Belgium, facing removal to the DRC”, in The Guardian‎[1], archived from the original on 5 January 2021:
      So lawyers started filing separate asylum requests for the children, arguing that reintegrating in countries they barely knew, after spending their childhood or adolescence in Belgium, would not only be impossible but would expose them to serious risks.
  3. (dated) A place of protection or restraint for one or more classes of the disadvantaged, especially the mentally ill.
    • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter V, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
      Of all the queer collections of humans outside of a crazy asylum, it seemed to me this sanitarium was the cup winner. […] When you're well enough off so's you don't have to fret about anything but your heft or your diseases you begin to get queer, I suppose.

place of safety

asylum (third-person singular simple present asylums, present participle asyluming, simple past and past participle asylumed) (dated)

  1. to place in an asylum
    • 1913, Marie Belloc Lowndes, chapter III, in Studies in Love & in Terror, page 144:
      It was she who in the last few years had spread abroad the notion that Charles Nagle, in the public interest, should be asylumed.
  2. to grant protection or refuge
    • 1887, 6th Annual Session Baptist Congress:
      We have..sheltered its paupers, asylumed its orphans, clothed its nakedness.

From Ancient Greek ἄσυλον (ásulon).

asȳlum n (genitive asȳlī); second declension

  1. asylum (place of refuge), sanctuary
    Synonyms: perfugium, latebra, receptāculum, tēctum, refugium, dēverticulum

Second-declension noun (neuter).