Enclave Meaning
/ˈɛnkleɪv/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
nounA political, cultural or social entity or part thereof that is completely surrounded by another.
nounA group that is set off from a larger population by its characteristic or behavior.
Sentence Examples
Israel could have flooded the Gaza-Egypt tunnels without annihilating the Palestinian enclave.
Migrants continue to trickle into Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The small Italian ____ is surrounded entirely by Swiss territory and culture.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The small diplomatic ____ remained safe during the military conflict.
Word Origin & History
Borrowed from French enclave, from Middle French enclave (“enclave”), deverbal of enclaver (“to inclose”), from Old French enclaver (“to inclose, lock in”), from Vulgar Latin *inclāvāre (“to lock in”), from in + Latin clavis (“key”) or clavus (“nail, bolt”). Compare inlock.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"They were learning to do what in all my years in the music business I never saw — which was women running a record company, women producing concerts, women learning to be engineers, women moving into this absolutely all-male enclave. You never saw a woman in any of those positions, in any of that work except as secretaries and "go-fers"."
— 1989 December 3, Pam Mitchell, Ronnie Gilbert, “Carrying On The Honorable Tradition Of 'Protest Music'”, in Gay Community News, volume 17, number 21, page 9:
"What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq."
— 2014 November 17, Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version: International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, in The New York Times:
"Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore."
— 2017 May 11, Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in”, in The Guardian:
"When an enclave spans a system boundary in a sysplex, it is called a multisystem enclave."
— 2010, Mike Ebbers, Dino Tonelli, Jason Arnold, Co-locating Transactional and Data Warehouse Workloads on System z, page 245:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The small Italian ____ is surrounded entirely by Swiss territory and culture.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The small diplomatic ____ remained safe during the military conflict.