Limitation
noun ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 The act of limiting or the state of being limited. countable, uncountable
- 2 an act of limiting or restricting (as by regulation) wordnet
- 3 A restriction; a boundary, real or metaphorical, caused by some thing or some circumstance. countable, uncountable
"Getting into his wheelchair after his amputation, it felt like a limitation you could roll in."
- 4 the quality of being limited or restricted wordnet
- 5 An imperfection or shortcoming that limits something's use or value. countable, uncountable
"Both the MI score and the t-score have their limitations. MI computes a logarithm representing the number of co-occurrences of words compared to their occurrences apart in the corpus, which can highlight rare collocations if the components tend not to occur with other words. The t-score formula is less susceptible to this but its numerical result cannot be meaningfully compared across corpora of different sizes."
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 a principle that limits the extent of something wordnet
- 7 A time period after which some legal action may no longer be brought. countable, uncountable
"The lawyer obtained impunity by dragging his obviously guilty client's case beyond the ten-year limitation."
- 8 the greatest amount of something that is possible or allowed wordnet
- 9 (law) a time period after which suits cannot be brought wordnet
Example
More examples"Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty."
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin limitatio. Morphologically limit + -ation.
Related phrases
More for "limitation"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.