bracket
noun
- architectural element with a flat-topped, angular projection or support. Used to support, sometimes with a shelf, various objects, such as a clock, a statuette, a plant, a lamp.
verb
- to put in the same category or group
Wiktionary
Pronunciation: /ˈbɹækɪt/
noun
- Alternative form of bragget (“drink made with ale and honey”).
verb
Etymology: 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”).
- 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.”
“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.
“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.
“SIL got access to academic legitimacy; linguists bracketed the evangelical engine that drives SIL because they got access to data and tools.”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.