Dictionary

arrestation en · NOUN

Etymology

From French arrestation, from Latin arrestatio.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) The act of arresting. ▸ The act of stopping or slowing something (especially a process).
   • […] 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, 1985, Jonathan Israel, chapter 10, in European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, page 237:
   • […] 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; 1847, Thomas Mayo, chapter 3, in Clinical Facts and Reflections, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, page 22:
   • 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. 1952, Therese Benedek, “Some Problems of Motherhood”, in A.M. Krich, editor, Women, New York: Dell, published 1953, page 173:
   • 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 […] 1922, Charles Masterman, chapter 1, in England After War,, London: Hodder and Stoughton, page 20:
2. (countable, dated, uncountable) The act of arresting. ▸ The act of catching someone's attention.
   • 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. 1922, Violet Firth, chapter 22, in The Machinery of the Mind, New York: Dodd, Mead, page 84:
3. (countable, dated, uncountable) The act of arresting. ▸ The act of arresting someone (taking them into legal custody).
   • 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. 1937, Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, New York: Random House, published 1938, Part 4, p. 267:
   • 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, […] the arrestation of the English residing in France was decreed by the national convention;

Forms

Synonyms

arrest · arrest