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Intimate; familiar; confidential. League with you I seek And mutual amity, so strait, so close, That I with you must dwell, or you with me. Milton.

To press together; to crowd; to straiten; to confine closely. [Obs.] Bacon.

To bring into a narrow compass; to compress. How the strait stays the slender waist constrain. Gay.

To shut up; to stop up; to close; to restrain. The strait pass was dammed With dead men hurt behind, and cowards. Shak. To dam out, to keep out by means of a dam.

Hard to suit; difficult to please. [Obs.] My wages ben full strait, and eke full small; My lord to me is hard and dangerous. Chaucer.

The outward opening of a river, of a valley, or of a strait.

Difficult situation; dilemma; strait. [Obs.] "I stand in such disjoint." Chaucer.

To cause separation; to disunite. A gulf, a strait, the sea intervening between islands, divide less than the matted forest. Bancroft.

A road for shipping in the English Channel or Straits of Dover, near Deal, employed as a naval rendezvous in time of war. On the 11th [June, 1771] we run up the channel . . . at noon we were abreast of Dover, and about three came to an anchor in the Downs, and went ashore at Deal. Cook (First Voyage).…

Not straitened as to money matters; as, the market is easy; -- opposed to tight. Honors are easy (Card Playing), said when each side has an equal number of honors, in which case they are not counted as points.

A strait; a narrow tract of water, where the tide, or a current, flows and reflows with violence, as the ancient fright of this name between Eubæa and Bæotia. Hence, a flux and reflux. Burke.

s appear inverted, distorted, displaced, or multiplied. It is noticed particularly at the Straits of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily.

To carry or transport over a river, strait, or other narrow water, in a boat.

o strip of money or other property unjustly, especially by trickery or frand; to bring to straits by oppressions and exactions. Whilst pope and prince shared the wool betwixt them, the people were finely fleeced. Fuller.

A strait, or arm of the sea.

A narrow strait between Europe and Asia, now called the Daradanelles. It connects the Ægean Sea and the sea of Marmora.

An immovable packing; (Med.), a lodgment of something in a strait or passage of the body; as, impaction of the fetal head in the strait of the pelvis; impaction of food or feces in the intestines of man or beast.

ive used humorously as a verb; as, to foot it (i. e., to walk). The Lacedemonians, at the Straits of Thermopylæ, when their arms failed them, fought it out with nails and teeth. Dryden. Whether the charmer sinner it, or saint it, If folly grows romantic, I must paint it. Pope. Its self. See Itself.

Limited as to means; straitened; pinching; as, narrow circumstances.

Figuratively: To cramp; to straiten; to oppress; to starve; to distress; as, to be pinched for money. Want of room . . . pinching a whole nation. Sir W. Raleigh.