Skip to content
Allin

cage

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //keɪd͡ʒ//

An enclosure made of spaced bars, normally to hold animals while providing some ventilation.

noun

  1. 1

    An enclosure made of spaced bars, normally to hold animals while providing some ventilation.

    We keep a bird in a cage.

    The tigers are in a cage to protect the public.

    The most dangerous prisoners are locked away in a cage.

    For his father had / never a house but the cage.

  2. 2

    The passenger compartment of a lift.

  3. 3

    The goal.

  4. 4

    slangSynonym of automobile.

  5. 5

    figurativeSomething that hinders freedom.

    Schwartz examines with dignity and tenderness the battles within and without of […] families, created and biological, and the cages and freedom they can provide.

    My body is a cage / That keeps me from dancing with the one I love / But my mind holds the key

  6. 6

    slangA prison or prison cell.

    The 'out of the closet' lesbians and gay men here in the Iowa Cages are harassed and discriminated daily by oppressive pigs, believe me, I know, as a lesbian I've experienced it first hand and seen my fellow lesbian and gay friends oppressed to where I'm ready to explode.

  7. 7

    The area from which competitors throw a discus or hammer.

  8. 8

    An outer framework of timber, enclosing something within it.

    Cage, in carpentry, is an outer work of timber inclosing another within it. Thus the cage of a stair is the wooden inclosure that encircles it.

  9. 9

    A skeleton frame to limit the motion of a loose piece, such as a ball valve.

  10. 10

    A wirework strainer, used in connection with pumps and pipes.

  11. 11

    The drum on which the rope is wound in a hoisting whim.

  12. 12

    The protective wire mask at the front of a helmet.

  13. 13

    A regular graph that has as few vertices as possible for its girth.

  14. 14

    In killer sudoku puzzles, a group of connecting cells that must contain a set of unique digits adding up to a certain total, in addition to the usual constraints of sudoku.

  15. 15

    Variant of roll cageShort for roll cage, a protective structure around the passenger compartment of a vehicle.

Etymology

From Middle English cage, from Old French cage, from Latin cavea. Doublet of cadge and cavea and related to jail.

verb

  1. 1

    To confine in a cage; to put into and keep in a cage.

    And the row of human captors, ever leering, They who caged me, Know their power and gloat on my captivity.

    Laying out the zoo on horseback, he went about making plans to combine his scrubby mesas and canyons with moats, and thereby eliminate caging many large animals—a revolutionary advance in American zoo design.

    The industrial practice of caging commercial laying hens has given caged housing a bad narne.

    Ancient nomads, wishing to ward off the evening chill and enjoy a meal around a campfire, had to collect wood and then spend time and effort coaxing the heat of friction out from between sticks to kindle a flame. With more settled people, animals were harnessed to capstans or caged in treadmills to turn grist into meal.

  2. 2

    slangTo imprison.

    The serial killer was caged for life.

  3. 3

    figurativeTo restrict someone's movement or creativity.

  4. 4

    To immobilize an artificial horizon.

    To prevent damage to its gimbal mountings during extreme aerobatic maneuvers, the navball should be caged before the start of a display sequence.

  5. 5

    To track individual responses to direct mail, either (advertising) to maintain and develop mailing lists or (politics) to identify people who are not eligible to vote because they do not reside at the registered addresses.

Forms

plural
cages
past tense
caged
past participle
caged
present participle
caging
third person singular
cages
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).