DUNGEON

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does dungeon mean? 

• DUNGEON (noun)
  The noun DUNGEON has 2 senses:

1. the main tower within the walls of a medieval castle or fortress

2. a dark cell (usually underground) where prisoners can be confined

  Familiarity information: DUNGEON used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• DUNGEON (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The main tower within the walls of a medieval castle or fortress

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

Synonyms:

donjon; dungeon; keep

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

fastness; stronghold (a strongly fortified defensive structure)

Instance hyponyms:

Black Hole of Calcutta (a dungeon (20 feet square) in a fort in Calcutta where as many as 146 English prisoners were held overnight by Siraj-ud-daula; the next morning only 23 were still alive)

Holonyms ("dungeon" is a part of...):

castle (a large building formerly occupied by a ruler and fortified against attack)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A dark cell (usually underground) where prisoners can be confined

Classified under:

Nouns denoting man-made objects

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

cell; jail cell; prison cell (a room where a prisoner is kept)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "dungeon"):

oubliette (a dungeon with the only entrance or exit being a trap door in the ceiling)

 Context examples 

I did not participate in these feelings, for to me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

A crazy old staircase I found it to be, feebly lighted on each landing by a club-headed little oil wick, dying away in a little dungeon of dirty glass.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

"Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said; "that house is a mere dungeon: don't you feel it so?"

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

When the king saw him he fell into a passion, and ordered him to be cast into the deepest dungeon.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

Water-swept and aslant, it was preferable to the noisome, rat-haunted dungeons which served as cabins.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

She also defied her sire, and he ordered them both to the deepest dungeons of the castle.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I answered, I was an Englishman, drawn by ill fortune into the greatest calamity that ever any creature underwent, and begged, by all that was moving, to be delivered out of the dungeon I was in.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Sometimes, indeed, I dreamt that I wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth, but I awoke and found myself in a dungeon.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

And now loaded with chains, he was standing at the window of his dungeon, when he chanced to see one of his comrades passing by.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)