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prisoner

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɹɪzənə//
  • United Kingdom//ˈpɹɪznə//
  • Canada//ˈpɹɪzənɚ//

A person incarcerated in a prison, while on trial or serving a sentence.

noun

  1. 1

    A person incarcerated in a prison, while on trial or serving a sentence.

    Two other prisoners were staying in the same cell as him.

    The evidence disclosed that the three prisoners were in a public-house together with the prosecutor, Abraham Rhodes, and that in concert with the other two prisoners, the prisoner John Dewhirst placed a pencase on the table in the room where they were assembled, and left the room to get writing-paper.

    American journalist Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan were among the 24 detainees released as part of a complex prisoner swap between Russia, the US and other Western nations. […] Krasikov, a former high-ranking FSB colonel serving a life sentence in a German prison, was on the top of Moscow’s list of Russian prisoners it wanted to exchange.

  2. 2

    Any person held against their will.

    And gainſt the General we will lift our ſwords / And either lanch his greedie thirſting throat, / Or take him priſoner, and his chaine ſhall ſerue / For Manackles, till he be ranſom’d home.

    Captain Edward Carlisle, soldier as he was, martinet as he was, felt a curious sensation of helplessness seize upon him as he met her steady gaze, her alluring smile ; he could not tell what this prisoner might do.

  3. 3

    A person who is or feels confined or trapped by a situation or a set of circumstances.

    I am no longer a prisoner to fear, for I am a child of God.

    I'm a prisoner of your love.

    You're not a hit and run driver, no no, racing away. You just picked up a hitcher, a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

Etymology

From Middle English prisoner, from Old French prisonier (compare Medieval Latin prisōnārius), equivalent to prison + -er.

Forms

plural
prisoners
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).