stricture
/ˈstrɪktʃə
/noun
1A restriction on a person or activity: the strictures imposed by the British Board of Film Censors...
- Significantly, ministers are to impose new strictures on police and social workers.
- You experience freedom from restrictions imposed by ideas and strictures.
- In all four gospel traditions, Jesus consistently makes the first move to reach out to the marginalized, often transgressing contemporary social mores and religious strictures in the process.
Synonyms
constraint, restriction, limitation, control, restraint, straitjacket, curb, check, impediment, bar, barrier, obstacle
2A sternly critical or censorious remark or instruction: his strictures on their lack of civic virtue...
- These tracts heed the critical strictures against both love and wit.
- Understanding the historicity of Adorno's strictures and imperatives is an unavoidable task for critical theory and aesthetics today.
- Such strictures may seem ironic coming from a historian whom some critics have seen as letting the landlords off lightly when it came to the abuse of their social and economic power.
Synonyms
criticism, censure, blame, condemnation, reproof, reproach, admonishment, disparagement, flak
informal knocking
British informal stick, slating
3 Medicine Abnormal narrowing of a canal or duct in the body: a colonic stricture [mass noun]: jaundice caused by bile duct stricture...
- At the time of referral, she was awaiting surgery for a colonic stricture resulting from a recurrence of carcinoma of the colon.
- A clear distinction between the dysphagia of an inflammatory stricture and that of carcinoma is impossible on clinical grounds alone.
- His past history was significant for chronic alcoholic pancreatitis with pancreatic duct strictures and stones which had been treated with dilation and stone extraction 4 years ago.
Synonyms
narrowing, constriction, strangulation, tightness
Derivatives
strictured
- This innovative and elegant procedure involved the ingenious refashioning of the stomach to replace the strictured oesophagus, and also to recreate the cardiac sphincter so as to maintain its function and continence.
- These writers indicate a world where mature-age students are keenly looking for new learning and new social interactions after having participated in strictured career lives.
- In these 23 patients, the main pancreatic duct was considered to be strictured or obliterated to various degrees due to the ampullary carcinoma.
Origin
Late Middle English (in sense 3): from Latin strictura, from stringere 'draw tight' (see strict). Another sense of the Latin verb, 'touch lightly', gave rise to sense 2 via an earlier meaning 'incidental remark'.