# coercion
## English
### Alternative forms

* coersion (misspelling)
* coërcion (chiefly dated)

### Etymology

Inherited from Middle English cohercioun, from Old French cohercion, from Latin coercitiō (“magisterial coercion”), from past participle coercitus of coerceō (“to restrain, coerce”), from co- (“with”) + arceō (“to shut in, enclose”); see coerce.

### Pronunciation

* (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /koʊˈɜːʃən/
* (General American) IPA: /koʊˈɝʒən/, /koʊˈɝʃən/
* Audio (US):(file)

### Noun

coercion (countable and uncountable, plural coercions)
* (uncountable) Actual or threatened force for the purpose of compelling action by another person; the act of coercing.
** 1947 March 12, Harry S. Truman, 5:24 from the start, in MP72-14 Excerpt - Truman Doctrine Speech‎, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives Identifier: 595162:One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion.
* (law, uncountable) Use of physical or moral force to compel a person to do something, or to abstain from doing something, thereby depriving that person of the exercise of free will.
* (countable) A specific instance of coercing.
* (programming, countable) Conversion of a value of one data type to a value of another data type.
* (linguistics, semantics) The process by which the meaning of a word or other linguistic element is reinterpreted to match the grammatical context.
** 2008, Oliver Bott, “Doing It Again and Again May Be Difficult, But It Depends on What You Are Doing”, in Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics‎, page 63:But often the pieces of information do not fit together and have to be shifted in meaning to confirm with the rest of the sentence. These shifts are called coercion
** 2016, Susanne Mohr, “From Accra to Nairobi – the use of pluralized mass nouns in East and West African postcolonial Englishes”, in Daniel Schmidt-Brücken, Susanne Schuster, Marina Wienberg, editors, Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics, Berlin: DeGruyter, →OCLC, page 161:...a conversion of mass nouns into count readings according to sorter and portion coercion is only possible if the denotation of a mass noun already comprises minimal parts into which the noun can be subdivided.
* (libertarianism) The initiation or threat of conflict; aggression.

#### Antonyms

* noncoercion

#### Hyponyms

* type coercion

#### Derived terms

* coercionary
* coercionist

#### Related terms

* coerce
* coercer
* coercible
* coercitive
* coercive

#### Translations
### Trivia

One of three common words ending in -cion, which are coercion, scion, and suspicion.

### References

* ↑ Notes and Queries, Vol. VI, No. 10, 1889, October, p. 365
* ↑ Editor and Publisher, Volume 9, 1909, p. 89
* “coercion”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
* “coercion”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.
* “coercion”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
* coercion on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

### Anagrams

* criocone