What is "circumscribe"

Usage examples of "circumscribe".

They were still confined to a tiny, circumscribed world of light and slippery surfaces, wondering what had happened to them but so surrounded by marvels that they had little time in which to bemoan possible fates.

Without precisely regretting the circumstances which had made it impossible for herself to shine farther afield than York and Scarborough, she was determined that Arabella should not be similarly circumscribed.

The king of Prussia having cleared all his part of Silesia, except the town of Schweidnitz, which he circumscribed with a blockade, sent detachments from his army cantoned in the neighbourhood of Breslau, to penetrate into the Austrian or southern part of Silesia, where they surprised Troppau and Jaggernsdorf, while he himself remained at Breslau, entertaining his officers with concerts of music.

Her character and career will illustrate most of the mistakes which are made by that ambitious class, among the gentler sex, who are now seeking so earnestly to pass out from that province of humiliation to which the sex has been circumscribed from the first moment of recorded history.

His school curriculum had been set by others, his homelife was ordered by his parents, and his summer wanderings were circumscribed by the township limits.

The object of such a movement was to give an opportunity to the native patriots to rally -- to compel the British to concentrate their scattered forces, call in their detached parties, and thus circumscribe their influence, within the State, to the places where they still remained in force.

Within the circumscribed area of the Stockade the Federal prisoners were compelled to perform all the offices of life--cooking, washing, the calls of nature, exercise, and sleeping.

Until he was awake and his mental performance could be tested and evaluated, there was a chance that he had been reanimated only to live out a life of anguish and frustration, his potential tragically circumscribed by irreparable brain damage.

Then, again, trustees are so circumscribed nowadays that they are afraid to do anything.

Indeed, a critical element in accepting forces from other countries is that they would accept an American chain of command and a carefully circumscribed role once the shooting starts.

Brokers circumscribed wary arcs as they passed, as if what he had was contagious.

First Istvan and now Helene Bourbon putting in appearances to shake her out of her quiet, circumscribed life.

I adored her pliant, fleshy reality and her runaway imagination, and saw no need to separate the two in my own mind, even if diplomacy circumscribed what I could say to her mother.

The Renunciates were an alternative, but she knew she was no Magda Lorne, and that living the circumscribed life of a Free Amazon was not a path she wished to pursue.

Because while the opportunities for advancement and promotion on Pyrassis were decidedly circumscribed, the demon of demotion was ever present and waiting to be fed.