Enclave
noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A political, cultural or social entity or part thereof that is completely surrounded by another.
"The Republic of San Marino is an enclave of Italy."
- 2 an enclosed territory that is culturally distinct from the foreign territory that surrounds it wordnet
- 3 A group that is set off from a larger population by its characteristic or behavior.
"They were learning to do what in all my years in the music business I never saw — which was women running a record company, women producing concerts, women learning to be engineers, women moving into this absolutely all-male enclave. You never saw a woman in any of those positions, in any of that work except as secretaries and "go-fers"."
- 4 An isolated portion of an application's address space, such that data in an enclave can only be accessed by code in the same enclave.
"When an enclave spans a system boundary in a sysplex, it is called a multisystem enclave."
- 1 To enclose within a foreign territory. transitive
Example
More examples"The death of thousands of people in Gaza is inevitable and that's what turns any massive attack on that enclave into a genocide."
Etymology
Borrowed from French enclave, from Middle French enclave (“enclave”), deverbal of enclaver (“to inclose”), from Old French enclaver (“to inclose, lock in”), from Vulgar Latin *inclāvāre (“to lock in”), from in + Latin clavis (“key”) or clavus (“nail, bolt”). Compare inlock.
Related phrases
More for "enclave"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.