Circumscribe
verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To draw a line around; to encircle.
- 2 restrict or confine within limits wordnet
- 3 To limit narrowly; to restrict.
""Well, I promise you to circumscribe her conquests as much as possible by extending my own," returned Henrietta. "It will be an easy task; for Miss Churchill does not do 'the honours of her eyes.' I often tell her her beauty is quite wasted upon her.""
- 4 draw a line around wordnet
- 5 To draw the smallest circle or higher-dimensional sphere that has (a polyhedron, polygon, etc.) in its interior.
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- 6 to draw a geometric figure around another figure so that the two are in contact but do not intersect wordnet
Example
More examples""Well, I promise you to circumscribe her conquests as much as possible by extending my own," returned Henrietta. "It will be an easy task; for Miss Churchill does not do 'the honours of her eyes.' I often tell her her beauty is quite wasted upon her.""
Etymology
From Latin circumscrībō, from circum (“around”) + scrībō (“write”). By surface analysis, circum- + scribe.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.