# bracket
## English
### Pronunciation

* IPA: /ˈbɹækɪt/
* Audio (US):(file)
* Rhymes: -ækɪt

### Etymology 1

From earlier bragget, *bracket, from Middle English *braget, *braket (attested in braket nail), from Old French braguette (“the opening in the fore part of a pair of breeches, one's fly”), a diminutive of Old French brague (“knickers, britches”), from Old Occitan braga, from Latin brāca (“pants”), from Transalpine Gaulish *brāca, from Proto-Germanic *brāks, an early form of Proto-Germanic *brōks (“leggings, breeches, trousers”).

#### Noun

bracket (plural brackets)
* A fixture attached to a wall to hold up a shelf.
* (engineering) Any intermediate object that connects a smaller part to a larger part, the smaller part typically projecting sideways from the larger part.
** 2005, Todd Downs, The Bicycling Guide to Complete Bicycle Maintenance & Repair for Road and Mountain bikes, →ISBN:To determine if your frame has this bottom bracket type, look for a notched and possibly knurled lockring on the left side (the side without the chainrings).
** 2013, Laura Mitchell, An Introduction to Orthodontics, →ISBN, page 220:Not only does the attachment on the tooth surface (called a bracket) allow the tooth to be moved vertically or tilted, but also a force couple can be generated by the interaction between the bracket and an archwire running through the bracket.
* (nautical) A short crooked timber, resembling a knee, used as a support.
* (military) The cheek or side of an ordnance carriage, supporting the trunnions.
* Any of the characters “(”, “)”, “[”, “]”, “{”, “}”, “⟨”, “⟩”, “<”, “>”, or the like, used in pairs to enclose parenthetic remarks, sections of mathematical expressions, etc.
** (UK) “(” and “)” specifically, the other forms above requiring adjectives for disambiguation.
** (US) “[” and “]” specifically, as opposed to the other forms, which have their own technical names.
* (sports) A diagram of games in a tournament.
* (sports) A prediction of the outcome of games in a tournament, used for betting purposes.
* One of several ranges of numbers.
    tax bracket, age bracket
* (algebra) A pair of values that represent the smallest and largest elements of a range.
* (military) Typically of stationary weapons, the zone enclosed by one long and one short shot impact expected to be hit very accurately.
* (typography) The small curved or angular corner formed by a serif and a stroke in a letter.
* (land surveying, 19th century) a mark cut into a stone by land surveyors to secure a bench.

##### Synonyms

* ("(" and ")"): parentheses, parens
* (land surveying): benchmark

##### Hyponyms

* See also Thesaurus:bracket

##### Derived terms

* angle bracket
* banana bracket
* birch bracket
* bottom bracket
* bracket buster
* bracket clock
* bracket creep
* bracketer
* bracket fungus
* bracketless
* bracketlike
* bracketology
* bracket race
* bracket racer
* bracket racing
* bracketry
* bracketwise
* brackety
* broket
* bulge bracket
* corner bracket
* curly bracket
* curly-bracket language
* diamond bracket
* gas bracket
* hair bracket
* income bracket
* income tax bracket
* Iverson bracket
* left bracket
* lenticular bracket
* multibracket
* pointy bracket
* price bracket
* right bracket
* shelf bracket
* superbracket
* tax bracket
* tortoise shell bracket
* unbracket

##### Translations

    The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

##### See also

Punctuation
* apostrophe ( ' ) ( ’ )
* curly brackets or braces (US) ( { } )
* square brackets or brackets (US) ( [ ] )
* colon ( : )
* comma ( , )
* dashes ( ‒ ) ( – ) ( — ) ( ― )
* ellipsis ( … )
* exclamation mark ( ! )
* fraction slash ( ⁄ )
* guillemets ( « » ) ( ‹ › )
* hyphen ( - ) ( ‐ )
* interpunct ( · )
* interrobang (rare) ( ‽ )
* brackets or parentheses (US, Canada) ( ( ) )
* full stop or period (US, Canada) ( . )
* question mark ( ? )
* quotation marks (formal) ( ‘ ’ ‚ ) ( “ ” „ )
* quotation marks (informal, computing) ( " ) ( ' )
* semicolon ( ; )
* slash or stroke (UK) ( / )
* space ( ] [ )

#### Verb

bracket (third-person singular simple present brackets, present participle bracketing, simple past and past participle bracketed)
* To support by means of mechanical brackets.
* To enclose in typographical brackets.
* To bound on both sides, to surround, as enclosing with brackets.
* To place in the same category.
    Because they didn’t have enough young boys for two full teams, they bracketed the seven-year-olds with the eight-year-olds.
** 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “Which Introduces Some Very Physical Phenomena”, in The Land of Mist, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, published 1926, →OCLC, page 158:Some villain who knows nothing about it comes into it for money and so the labours of honest mediums get discounted. The public very naturally brackets them all together.
* To mark distinctly for special treatment.
** 1992, Tom Burns, Erving Goffman, page 292:Next, since so much social activity is defined by being bracketed out of the world of ongoing events, it becomes possible that outside such bracketed episodes, […] people are — especially beforehand, but also afterwards — to some extent "out of role", and so off their guard.
* To set aside, discount, ignore.
** 2009, Michael Erard, “Holy Grammar, Inc.”, in Search Magazine, July–August 2009:
    SIL got access to academic legitimacy; linguists bracketed the evangelical engine that drives SIL because they got access to data and tools.
* (military) To gauge the range of a target by firing equally short and long of it and ranging the weapon between the two to achieve a very accurate hit.
* (photography) To take multiple images of the same subject, using a range of exposure settings, in order to help ensure that a satisfactory image is obtained.
* (philosophy, phenomenology) In the philosophical system of Edmund Husserl and his followers, to set aside metaphysical theories and existential questions concerning what is real in order to focus philosophical attention simply on the actual content of experience.

##### Translations
### Etymology 2
#### Noun

bracket (uncountable)
* Alternative form of bragget (“drink made with ale and honey”)

### Anagrams

* betrack

## Spanish
### Alternative forms

* bráket
* bráquet

### Etymology

Pseudo-anglicism, derived from bracket.

### Pronunciation

* IPA: /ˈbɾaket/ [ˈbɾa.ket̪]
* Rhymes: -aket

### Noun

bracket m (plural brackets)
* (in the plural, orthodontics) braces (a device worn on the teeth to straighten them)
    Synonyms: aparatos, aparatos dentales, frenos, frenillo
* bracket (diagram representing the sequence of games in a sports tournament)

### Further reading

* “bracket”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10
* bracket | FundéuRAE (fundeu.es)