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Dependent in form; conventional. Still in constraint your suffering sex remains, Or bound in formal or in real chains. Pope.

Exemption from constraint or oppression; freedom; liberty. [Obs.] Spenser.

Unconstrained by timidity or distrust; unreserved; ingenuous; frank; familiar; communicative. He was free only with a few. Milward.

A will free from improper coercion or restraint. To come thus was I not constrained, but did On my free will. Shak.

confinement; restraint. His sinews waxen weak and raw Through long imprisonment and hard constraint. Spenser. Every confinement of the person is an imprisonment, whether it be in a common prison, or in a private house, or even by foreibly detaining one in the public streets. Blackstone. False imprisonment. (Law) See u…

Not compelled; unconstrained. [Obs.] Coles.

Expressing or indicating the feeling of independence; free; easy; bold; unconstrained; as, an independent air or manner.

s forget So great indignities you laid upon me Shak. A person of so great place and worth constrained to endure so foul indignities. Hooker.

oduce, languor; characterized by languor. [Obs. or Poetic] Whom late I left in languorous constraint. Spenser. To wile the length from languorous hours, and draw The sting from pain. Tennyson.

The power of choice; freedom from necessity; freedom from compulsion or constraint in willing. The idea of liberty is the idea of a power in any agent to do or forbear any particular action, according to the determination or thought of the mind, whereby either of them is preferred to the other. Locke. This liberty of j…

l, mass of confined liquid, etc., by which relative motion of other parts is produced and constrained.

Free from constraint or obligation; not bound by duty, habit, etc. ; -- with from or of. Now I stand Loose of my vow; but who knows Cato's thoughts Addison.

In general, any combination of bodies so connected that their relative motions are constrained, and by means of which force and motion may be transmitted and modified, as a screw and its nut, or a lever arranged to turn about a fulcrum or a pulley about its pivot, etc.; especially, a construction, more or less complex,…

To require; to constrain; to compel; to force; to cause; to occasion; -- followed by a noun or pronoun and infinitive.

De Quincey. Thou oughtest not to be slothful to the destruction of the miscreants, but to constrain them to obey our Lord God. Rivers.

To bring or place under obligation, moral or legal; to hold by a constraining motive. "Obligated by a sense of duty." Proudfit. That's your true plan -- to obligate The present ministers of state. Churchill.

That which obligates or constrains; the binding power of a promise, contract, oath, or vow, or of law; that which constitutes legal or moral duty. A tender conscience is a stronger obligation than a proson. Fuller.

To constrain by physical, moral, or legal force; to put under obligation to do or forbear something. The obliging power of the law is neither founded in, nor to be measured by, the rewards and punishments annexed to it. South. Religion obliges men to the practice of those virtues which conduce to the preservation of ou…

The state of being constrained, bound, or obliged; that which constrains or obliges; obligation; bond. [R.] Milton.

To constrain; to put under obligation. [R.] Bp. Gardiner.