CONFINES

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does confines mean? 

• CONFINES (noun)
  The noun CONFINES has 1 sense:

1. a bounded scope

  Familiarity information: CONFINES used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CONFINES (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A bounded scope

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Context example:

he stayed within the confines of the city

Hypernyms ("confines" is a kind of...):

ambit; compass; orbit; range; reach; scope (an area in which something acts or operates or has power or control:)

Domain usage:

plural; plural form (the form of a word that is used to denote more than one)

 Context examples 

It ought not to have touched on the confines of her imagination.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

But my plan was unsettled, and I wandered many hours round the confines of the town, uncertain what path I should pursue.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I assure Mr. T. T. that I would not intrude upon his kindness, were I in any other position than on the confines of distraction.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Its limits were the walls of the lair; but as he had no knowledge of the wide world outside, he was never oppressed by the narrow confines of his existence.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

This nanoscale conduit confines the translocation of biomolecules.

(Nanochannel, NCI Thesaurus)

He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Then, as he is criminal he is selfish; and as his intellect is small and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one purpose.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

So terrible was his appearance that Spitz was forced to forego disciplining him; but to cover his own discomfiture he turned upon the inoffensive and wailing Billee and drove him to the confines of the camp.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

Still you are miserable; for hope has quitted you on the very confines of life: your sun at noon darkens in an eclipse, which you feel will not leave it till the time of setting.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

All this I shall some day write at fuller length, and amidst these more stirring days I would tenderly sketch in these lovely summer evenings, when with the deep blue sky above us we lay in good comradeship among the long grasses by the wood and marveled at the strange fowl that swept over us and the quaint new creatures which crept from their burrows to watch us, while above us the boughs of the bushes were heavy with luscious fruit, and below us strange and lovely flowers peeped at us from among the herbage; or those long moonlit nights when we lay out upon the shimmering surface of the great lake and watched with wonder and awe the huge circles rippling out from the sudden splash of some fantastic monster; or the greenish gleam, far down in the deep water, of some strange creature upon the confines of darkness.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)