A restraint that confines or restricts freedom (especially something used to tie down or restrain a prisoner)

Usage examples of hamper.

Trade was hampered by widespread piracy, agriculture was so inefficient that the population was never fed adequately, the name exchequer emerged to describe the royal treasury because the officials were so deficient in arithmetic they were forced to use a chequered cloth as a kind of abacus when making calculations.

His fingers were somewhat hampered by the bars, but Alec got Tell Micum silver fish.

But, in this respect, the Hallichek Ambassadress and her Embassy staff were sorely hampered.

Monsieur Mangin held on his lap his few special provisions for the journey: a hamper of sandwiches and wine, a pocket compass and a small aneroid barometer.

His arms were full of harpoons, hampered, while Debby and Carlot and Booce had no weapons at all.

The fallen slowed them, but they counterattacked with grim ferocity, beasts clambering over the dead and dying to reach the ambushers, tearing at their own in their bloodlust when the wounded hampered them.

They felt themselves authorized by social necessity to pursue their own interests energetically and unscrupulously, and they were not either hampered or helped in so doing by the interference of the local or the national authorities.

He loved Kamila too much for her to be hampered by the presence of a child.

Air conditioners were failing, dogs had diarrhea, laundry mildewed in hampers, and sinus cavities felt filled with cement.

It was well understood by everyone that the agreed occupational zones must not hamper the operational movements of the armies.

If to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities that hampered and subjugated the faculties of the poets, the dramatists, the historians, essayists, story-tellers, orators, of the worn-out races which have preceded the great American people.

Impatient hands pushed the sleeveless dress off her shoulders and Pilar lowered her arms to let it slide to the floor, glad to be rid of the hampering garment.

The moon was now sufficiently high to cast its soft light on the whole of the glittering basin, and a forest composed of lateen yards, of the slender masts of polaccas, and of the more massive and heavy hamper of regularly rigged ships, was to be seen rising above the tranquil element.

Order of Saint Michael of Pumpernickel were sent to the nobles of the Court, while hampers of the cordons and decorations of the Wheel of St.

There was no lesson with Miss Rigg, but I had quite a lot of washing in the hamper, and I had promised myself that I would turn out the attic room this week because I had missed that earlier in the year when I was spring-cleaning.