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

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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

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[2], 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[3], 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.

actual or threatened force for the purpose of compelling action by another person — see also coaction

use of force to compel

instance of coercing

One of three common words ending in -cion, which are coercion, scion, and suspicion.[2][3]

  1. ^ Pyles, Thomas (1972), “The Auditory Mass Media and U”, in Lawrence M. Davis, editor, Studies in linguistics in honor of Raven I. McDavid, Jr.‎[1], University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 430.
  2. ^ Notes and Queries, Vol. VI, No. 10, 1889, October, p. 365
  3. ^ Editor and Publisher, Volume 9, 1909, p. 89