Dictionary

cubbyhole en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• (Southern-England) audio
• /ˈkʌbiˌhoʊl/ (General-American)

Etymology

From cubby + hole.

Meanings

1. A small, snug room which may be used as a place of privacy, or a safe place for children
   • To reach the courtroom, on the second floor, one passed sundry sunless county cubbyholes: the tax assessor, the tax collector, the county clerk, the county solicitor, the circuit clerk, the judge of probate lived in cool dim hutches that smelled of decaying record books mingled with old damp cement and stale urine. 1960 July 11, Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC:
2. A small compartment; a pigeonhole
3. A glove compartment

Forms

Translations (14)

ru закуто́к (a small, snug room) · pl izdebka (a small, snug room) · it cubicolo (a small, snug room) · sk kutica (a small, snug room) · nl verdwijnhoekje (a small, snug room) · pl kanciapa (a small, snug room) · pt cubículo (a small, snug room) · sv krypin (a small, snug room) · pl klitka (a small, snug room) · tr hücre (a small, snug room) · ota حجره (a small, snug room) · ru ко́мнатка (a small, snug room) · ru ую́тное месте́чко (a small, snug room) · pl pokoik (a small, snug room)

cubbyhole en · VERB

Pronunciation

• (Southern-England) audio
• /ˈkʌbiˌhoʊl/ (General-American)

Etymology

From cubby + hole.

Meanings

1. To restrict, limit or narrowly define; to pigeonhole.
   • Rivera: The world has changed. It is no longer cubbyholed. I do not think — Friendly: What do you mean cubbyholed? Rivera: I do not think the definition of journalist is as narrowly construed these days as perhaps it was once. 1989, ASNE: Proceedings of the 1989 Convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, page 13:
   • Delimited files and spreadsheets compartmentalize data by separating each piece of info with a comma or a tab, or by cubbyholing them into columns and rows in a spreadsheet file. 2013, Bonnie Biafore, QuickBooks 2014: The Missing Manual, O’Reilly:
   • A true Renaissance man, Walcott has consistently resisted being cubbyholed. He has rejected neither his Caribbean heritage nor his British education. 1994, Rita Dove, ““Either I’m Noboby, or I’m a Nation””, in Herbert A. Leibowitz, editor, Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in Review, The University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 244:
   • The Americans wanted to have enclosed offices, or at the very least, shoulder-high partitions cubbyholing individual desks. 2006, J. J. Fucini, S. Fucini, “A Third-Culture Plant”, in Ed Rhodes, James P. Warren, Ruth Carter, editors, Supply Chains and Total Product Systems: A Reader, The Open University; Blackwell Publishing, page 289:
   • In the current era, there is too much demand for customer service and the restrains on budgets too great for you to allow cubbyholing.[…]And finally, out of necessity, a small organization like ours, with an increasing workload, could not afford to cubbyhole anyone, let alone 10 percent of our workforce. I advised my directors of my expectation that everybody had to work, that there was to be no cubbyholing, and that there would be no exceptions. 2015, Vince Meconi, A Practical Guide to Government Management, Bernan Press, The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., →ISBN, pages 83 and 89:
   • And, if we do so, it would be useful to bear in mind Sloterdijk’s insights regarding the amphibian quality of discourse within the Weimar Republic and the compelling ways in which it eludes easy generalization and comfortable cubbyholing. 2011, Eric Rentschler, “Rudolf Arnheim’s Early Passage Between Social and Aesthetic Film Criticism”, in Scott Higgins, editor, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, Routledge, pages 62–63:
   • If you have more than two dozen databases on your server, consider cubbyholing them into schemas in a single database. 2015, Regina O. Obe, Leo S. Hsu, PostgreSQL: Up and Running: A Practical Introduction to the Advanced Open Source Database, 2nd edition, O’Reilly:

Forms