Definition

A gauntlet is a type of protective glove worn as a part of a suit of armor or for hand protection in various activities, including sports. It can also refer to a challenge or ordeal that someone must go through or a double line of people that someone must walk through while being hit or attacked.

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


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Excerpts from News Articles

Of course, some Confederate ships ran the gauntlet of the blockade, and some American cotton made it to Liverpool. Yet when this material, grown by enslaved people, got to Manchester, many labourers refused to come back to work. Despite their poverty and hunger, despite their pain during this “cotton famine”, they would not put the produce of slavery through their looms. After a meeting at the Free Trade Hall on New Year’s Eve 1862, in solidarity with the enslaved people of the American south, they went on strike.

Logo 2023-03-29 The Guardian

But, in the United States, the default by law is to organize shop by shop, under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that regulates collective bargaining in the private sector. This process—of meeting in secret, signing union cards, winning an election, and eventually bargaining for a contract—is time-intensive and costly, and feels, to the workers involved, like a spiky gauntlet . For employers, each bureaucratic stage presents another opportunity to pull workers away from the union—or, simply, “to stall, to stall, and to stall,” in Sanders’s words—until the enthusiasm fades.

Logo 2023-03-29 The New Yorker

You join a long line at the ticket turnstile, run the gauntlet past aggressive souvenir vendors, then emerge into a clearing to see … thousands of other tourists gathered around the Mexican ruins.

Logo 2023-03-31 CNN News

Riesman’s subtitle throws down a grand gauntlet . She sees in McMahon’s story a larger tale of the duplicitous turn that the United States has taken over that same forty years. It is not hard to see parallels between wrestling kayfabe and the wider cultural substitution of performance for substance which climaxed with the election of Donald Trump. (In 2016, as Trump blustered toward the Presidency, the Times Magazine ran an essay exploring this idea, titled “Is Everything Wrestling?”)

Logo 2023-03-31 The New Yorker

Vampire Survivors has thrown down a gauntlet in what may well become a new sub genre.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Conversation

We don’t really want to run the gauntlet in the Senate, for example, on legislative change to the RBA Act. The RBA Act should be something that we can agree on and put beyond politics.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Conversation

Confident that it would become the backbone of a functioning state, the U.S. invested billions in road construction and improvements to ease trade and reinforce government control across 34 provinces. Despite the improvements made, highways became the defining crucible of the war: a deadly gauntlet where thousands of Afghan forces and civilians perished, commerce was thwarted and development funds stolen with impunity.

Logo 2023-04-20 CGTN

In defending the court's current ethics, Roberts can always throw down the ultimate gauntlet of impeachment: If Congress is not satisfied with the court's self-policing, let it use the tool provided in the Constitution — impeachment.

Logo 2023-04-22 NPR

I read the line and immediately it felt like a gauntlet thrown down. Did I believe my writing was as important as my children? I didn’t think so, but I thought perhaps it was important to try thinking it, try saying it, to roll the words like olives in my mouth:

Logo 2023-04-25 Literary Hub

Former Cisco CEO John Chambers, who founded his JC2 Ventures firm after leaving the networking giant, laid down the gauntlet during the morning keynote, saying: "AI … will be bigger than the internet, and bigger than the cloud combined, in every aspect of defense."

Logo 2023-04-27 The Register

"Now, all of these issues would be much easier to put to bed if stocks were lower, and that's what's happening," Cramer said. "It's not a bear market, just an interlude, and you have to recognize these four hurdles are a gauntlet , a real gauntlet , that must be traversed."

Logo 2023-05-02 CNBC

Unlike Ball’s generation, today’s comedians don’t just face the dreaded audience silence when a joke bombs on stage, they dread a career-ending cancellation. It takes bravery to run the PC gauntlet and connect to real people. Humphries made us laugh, the first responsibility of any comedian, and for that was subjected to a Soviet-style de-personalisation by the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the very comedy festival he created.

Logo 2023-05-03 The Spectator

We must not forget that the United States has legal obligations to provide protection to people who qualify as refugees under international law. Asylum is the category of legal protection we offer people who are persecuted in their home countries for characteristics they cannot or should not have to change about themselves — political opinion and religion, but also whom someone loves, gender, race or ethnicity. Even before the Biden administration’s new policies, our system betrayed a hollowness to this promise: Asylum seekers were regularly mistreated, detained and put through a bureaucratic gauntlet without aid or explanation.

Logo 2023-05-05 The New York Times

Wall Street's heightened focus on the debt ceiling comes after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday warned the U.S. may exhaust its ability to meet its borrowing obligations as early as June 1 — at least a month in advance of predictions by many Wall Street economists. On Tuesday, Jim Cramer said "this gauntlet is too hard to get through without some real bumps." What's the hold up on raising the limit?

Logo 2023-05-06 CNBC

American poets, the gauntlet has been thrown. Your move.

Logo 2023-05-08 Literary Hub