Definition

To “fetter” is to restrict or restrain someone or something, usually by using physical or metaphorical chains or other devices. It implies a sense of confinement or limitation that prevents freedom or movement.

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


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Excerpts from News Articles

"This style later became a frustrating fetter for me. I felt sad and I lost the desire to write," he says.

Logo 2023-03-20 China Daily

But hostility to the Confederacy and support for enslaved Americans were not universal sentiments in Victorian Manchester, for cotton grown by enslaved people was essential to the city’s prosperity. It followed that, despite professing broadly abolitionist sentiments, the Manchester Guardian could write in May 1861 of “the emancipation of the south from dependence on the north” and that “to the south, the bonds of the union have been as burdensome as the fetters [of slavery] to the negro”. It was an ambiguous, ambivalent position – and one that well reflected Manchester’s historical relationship with slavery.

Logo 2023-03-29 The Guardian

One thing alone has, in the past, lessened our sympathy with your country and our confidence in it – we mean, the ascendancy of politicians who not merely maintained negro slavery, but desired to extend and root it more firmly. Since we have discerned, however, that the victory of the Free North in the war … will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy.

Logo 2023-04-03 The Guardian

In it, Donaghue states that the proposed model for the Voice “will not fetter or impede the exercise of existing powers of Parliament”, adding that the proposal

Logo 2023-04-21 The Conversation

He adds: “One major advantage of the ‘from the sand’ approach is that when designing and building a city from scratch, we are not fettered by existing infrastructure. Roadways, airports, public transit, landscape, and urban design can all be built with smart sustainability in mind.”

Logo 2023-04-24 CNN News

Her body is a sort of shield that he holds in front of himself to fend off the attack by time. Yet the implication is that their coexistence has been a fetter on his soul. There is something apparently humble, something almost comic in his willingness to present himself as one half of their couple.

Logo 2023-04-24 The New Yorker

This isn’t a drama but a political rally for brainwashed zombies. However, if Hawkins can escape the crippling fetters of artistic orthodoxy he could write something exceptional.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Spectator