trammel

From Middle English trameyle, from Old French tramail (“net for catching fish”), from Late Latin tremaculum, from tri- (“tri-”) +‎ macula (“spot, speck; mesh, cell”). Cognate with Italian tramaglio (“trammel”), Spanish trasmallo (“drift net”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈtræməl/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æməl

trammel (plural trammels)

1. Whatever impedes activity, progress, or freedom, such as a net or shackle.
   • 1825, Francis Jeffrey, “Campbell's Theodric”, in The Edinburgh Review January 1825:

     [They] disclaim the trammels of any sordid contract.

   • 1898, William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, in War and Other Essays, Yale, published 1911, page 332:

     The men who came here were able to throw off all the trammels of tradition and established doctrine.

2. A fishing net that has large mesh at the edges and smaller mesh in the middle
3. A kind of net for catching birds, fishes, or other prey.
   • 1633,
     1609, Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall. […], new edition, London: […] B. Law, […]; Penzance, Cornwall: J. Hewett, published 1769, →OCLC:

     The tuck carrieth a like fashion , save that it is narrower meshed , and ( therefore scarce lawful ) with a long bunt in the midst : the trammel differeth not much from the shape of this bunt, and serveth to such use as the wear and haking.

4. A vertical bar with several notches or chain of rings suspended over a fire, used to hang cooking pots by a hook which has an easily adjustable height.
5. Braids or plaits of hair.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     Her golden lockes she roundly did uptye
     In breaded tramels, that no looser heares
     Did out of order stray about her daintie eares.

6. A kind of shackle used for regulating the motions of a horse and making it amble.
7. (engineering) An instrument for drawing ellipses, one part of which consists of a cross with two grooves at right angles to each other, the other being a beam carrying two pins (which slide in those grooves), and also the describing pencil.
8. A beam compass.

trammel (third-person singular simple present trammels, present participle (UK) trammelling or (US) trammeling, simple past and past participle (UK) trammelled or (US) trammeled)

1. To entangle, as in a net.
   • 1880, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lines 9–10:

     the scarce-snatched hours
     Which deepening pain left to his lordliest powers: —
     Heaven lost through spider-trammelled prison-bars.

2. (transitive) To confine; to hamper; to shackle.
   • 1854, Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts:

     In their vote, you would get something of some value, at least, however small; but in the other case, only the trammelled judgment of an individual, of no significance, be it which way it might.

   • 1948, Winston Churchill, The Second World War:

     Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness.

• Lammert