TURNKEY

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does turnkey mean? 

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

1. someone who guards prisoners

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• TURNKEY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Someone who guards prisoners

Classified under:

Nouns denoting people

Synonyms:

gaoler; jailer; jailor; prison guard; screw; turnkey

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

keeper (someone in charge of other people)

law officer; lawman; peace officer (an officer of the law)

 Context examples 

She was a hired nurse, the wife of one of the turnkeys, and her countenance expressed all those bad qualities which often characterise that class.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I was to ask my way to such a place, and just short of that place I should see such another place, and just short of that I should see a yard, which I was to cross, and keep straight on until I saw a turnkey.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

But I was doomed to live and in two months found myself as awaking from a dream, in a prison, stretched on a wretched bed, surrounded by gaolers, turnkeys, bolts, and all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

All this I did; and when at last I did see a turnkey (poor little fellow that I was!), and thought how, when Roderick Random was in a debtors' prison, there was a man there with nothing on him but an old rug, the turnkey swam before my dimmed eyes and my beating heart.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)