arrestation

English

Etymology

From French arrestation, from Latin arrestatio.

Noun

arrestation (countable and uncountable, plural arrestations)

1. The act of arresting.
   1. The act of stopping or slowing something (especially a process).

      Synonym: arrest

      • 1847, Thomas Mayo, chapter 3, in Clinical Facts and Reflections‎^[1], London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, page 22:

        […] he had continued [the treatment] to the day on which I saw him […] with relief of pain and improvement of his general feelings, but without any arrestation of his decline in strength and weight;

      • 1922, Charles Masterman, chapter 1, in England After War,‎^[2], London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 20:

        We realise that the results of the war are revealed not only in the total of lives lost or wrecked […] but on the ruin of the fabric of Society, […] the arrestation of progress moral and material […]

      • 1952, Therese Benedek, “Some Problems of Motherhood”, in A.M. Krich, editor, Women‎^[3], New York: Dell, published 1953, page 173:

        While arrestation of physiological maturation may occur on the basis of inhibiting emotional factors, one cannot make the general statement that the stronger the prohibitions, the greater is the delay in sexual maturation.

      • 1985, Jonathan Israel, chapter 10, in European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism‎^[4], Oxford: Clarendon Press, page 237:

        […] in most of Europe […] population stagnated or actually declined during the seventeenth century. This arrestation of population growth […] was particularly noticeable in Spain, central Europe, Poland, and Italy,

   2. (dated) The act of catching someone's attention.
      • 1922, Violet Firth, chapter 22, in The Machinery of the Mind‎^[5], New York: Dodd, Mead, page 84:

        Different hypnotists use different methods of inducing this condition, but the main factor in all of them is the fixation and arrestation of the attention and the use of suggestion.

   3. (dated) The act of arresting someone (taking them into legal custody).

      Synonym: arrest

      • 1794, Helen Maria Williams, letter dated September 1794 in Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1795, Volume 1, p. 4,^[6]

        […] the arrestation of the English residing in France was decreed by the national convention;

      • 1937, Karen Blixen, Out of Africa‎^[7], New York: Random House, published 1938, Part 4, p. 267:

        He was not a German, and could prove it, so that only a short time afterwards he got out of arrest and changed his name. But at that hour I saw in his arrestation, the finger of God, for now there was nobody but me to take the waggons through the country.

French

Etymology

From Middle French arrestation. Equivalent to arrêter +‎ -ation. The noun, being of a more formal register, was standardised with a Latinate pronunciation, while the verb has the popular form with loss of preconsonantal s.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /a.ʁɛs.ta.sjɔ̃/

• Audio

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Noun

arrestation f (plural arrestations)

1. arrest (“The act of arresting a criminal, suspect, etc.”)

Derived terms

• en état d’arrestation

Further reading

• “arrestation”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.