Straiten

verb

verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To make strait; to narrow or confine to a smaller space.

    "The channel straitened the river through the town, made it flow faster, and caused more flooding upstream."

  2. 2
    squeeze together wordnet
  3. 3
    To restrict or diminish, especially financially.

    "And the reason why Birds are Oviparous and lay Eggs, but do not bring forth their yong alive, is, because there might be more plenty of them also, and that neither the Birds of prey, the Serpent nor the Fowler, should streighten their generations too much."

  4. 4
    bring into difficulties or distress, especially financial hardship wordnet
  5. 5
    Misspelling of straighten. alt-of, misspelling

Synonyms

All synonyms
checkcontractarrestbehedgebindbottle

Antonyms

All antonyms
widen

Example

More examples

"The channel straitened the river through the town, made it flow faster, and caused more flooding upstream."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.