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The barrier or works which confine the water of a stream or canal.

Unbound; untied; unsewed; not attached, fastened, fixed, or confined; as, the loose sheets of a book. Her hair, nor loose, nor tied in formal plat. Shak.

s to the cause of education and the care of destitute orphans, their labors being chiefly confined to the Western United States.

The state attending, and consequent to, childbirth; confinement.

A house where insane persons are confined; an insane asylum; a bedlam.

To put handcuffs or other fastening upon, for confining the hands; to shackle; to confine; to restrain from the use of the limbs or natural powers. Is it thus you use this monarch, to manacle and shackle him hand and foot Arbuthnot.

ed by excess of some characteristic peculiarity. His style is in some degree mannered and confined. Hazlitt.

A territorial border or frontier; a region adjacent to a boundary line; a confine; -- used chiefly in the plural, and in English history applied especially to the border land on the frontiers between England and Scotland, and England and Wales. Geneva is situated in the marches of several dominions -- France, Savoy, an…

ent, compact, etc. "Thy hand upon that match." Shak. Love doth seldom suffer itself to be confined by other matches than those of its own making. Boyle.

A kind of sick or nevrous headache, usually periodical and confined to one side of the head.

cage for hawks while mewing; a coop for fattening fowls; hence, any inclosure; a place of confinement or shelter; -- in the latter sense usually in the plural. Full many a fat partrich had he in mewe. Chaucer. Forthcoming from her darksome mew. Spenser. Violets in their secret mews. Wordsworth.

An alley where there are stables; a narrow passage; a confined place. [Eng.] Mr. Turveydrop's great room... was built out into a mews at the back. Dickens.

A fabled monster, half man and half bull, confined in the labyrinth constructed by Dædalus in Crete.

Homophonic; -- applied to music in which the melody is confined to one part, instead of being shared by all the parts as in the style called polyphonic.

That which serves to confine a ship to a place, as anchors, cables, bridles, etc.

Of little extent; very limited; circumscribed. The Jews were but a small nation, and confined to a narrow compass in the world. Bp. Wilkins.

Beyond the limits of concealment, confinement, privacy, constraint, etc., actual of figurative; hence, not in concealment, constraint, etc., in, or into, a state of freedom, openness, disclosure, publicity, etc.; as, the sun shines out; he laughed out, to be out at the elbows; the secret has leaked out, or is out; the…

To fasten with, or as with, a padlock; to stop; to shut; to confine as by a padlock. Milton. Tennyson.

Anything that partakes of the nature of different things. [Obs.] The participles or confines between plants and living creatures. Bacon.

To put pegs into; to fasten the parts of with pegs; as, to peg shoes; to confine with pegs; to restrict or limit closely. I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails. Shak.