DETAIN • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Detain

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/dɪtˈeɪn/ Listen

verb

Detain v. t. (past & past part. detained; pres. part. detaining)

To keep back or from; to withhold. "Detain not the wages of the hireling."

To restrain from proceeding; to stay or stop; to delay; as, we were detained by an accident. "Let us detain thee, until we shall have made ready a kid for thee."

To hold or keep in custody.

Synonyms: To withhold; retain; stop; stay; arrest; check; retard; delay; hinder.

noun

Detain n. Detention. (Obs.)

See images of 'Detain'

Etymology of 'Detain'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Detain" Quotes from Famous Books

... we're the larrikin hoodoos! The chirruping, lirruping hoodoos! We mix things up that the Fates ordain, Bring back the past and the present detain, Postpone the future and sometimes tether The three and drive them abreast together— We ...

— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... the proprietors have ever been to Spain to take possession and report to the rest of us the state of our property there. I, of course, cannot go, I am too much engaged. So is Titbottom. And I find it is the case with all the proprietors. We have so much to detain us at home that we cannot get away. But it is always so with rich men. Prue sighed once as she sat at the window and saw Bourne, the millionaire, the President of innumerable companies, and manager and director of all the charitable societies in town, going by with wrinkled brow and hurried step. ...

— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... found. The metaphysical question, whether the soul as a spiritual substance is capable of being wholly inactive, or whether it is not in what seem the moments of profoundest unconsciousness partially awake—the question so warmly discussed by the Cartesians, Leibnitz, etc.—need not detain us here. ...

— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... Plato's teaching that souls really come from the stars and return thither; the third is about the loss of merit through coercion of the will, as exemplified in the case of Piccarda. The solution of these difficulties need not detain us if only we remember Dante's view that "the theories maintained by him in the Heaven of the Moon are intended to manifest," as Gardner and Scartazzini point out, "the moral freedom of man and to show that no external thing can interfere with the soul that is bent upon attaining ...

— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... with sorrow On this Easter morrow Watch the Savior's tomb, Banish all your sadness, On this day of gladness Joy must vanquish gloom. Christ this hour With mighty power Crushed the foe who would detain Him; Nothing could ...

— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

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