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Is there a word, preferably a verb, that means that keeping a large group of people in a small confined space?

For example, the US government "kept" a large number of child migrants at its detention centre. What more informative word should we use to replace the generic word "kept"?

Berry Guo
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8 Answers8

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If you want to stress the idea of many people packed into a confined space you can use cram:

to force a lot of things into a small space:

Eight children were crammed into the back of the car.

(Cambridge Dictionary)

Gio
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I don't know why I can't find an appropriate dictionary definition (it's not even in the full Oxford English Dictionary), but...

[Many child migrants] were coralled in [a detention centre].

Even though I can't find a definition, there are lots of matches for the highlighted search string, so the intended sense is obvious.

EDIT:
Ooops! My bad spelling (but given the "lots of matches" I found in Google Books, I don't feel too embarrassed! :) ...

corral (noun) Merriam-Webster
a pen or enclosure for confining or capturing livestock

corral (transitive verb)
to enclose in a corral

...which regardless of whether it's corralled or (far less common) corraled, still gets far more hits in Google Books than my completely mis-spelled version above.

A more recent term specifically used in the context of (riot) police packing protesters into a small, easily-controlled space...

kettle
Kettling (also known as containment or corralling) is a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests. It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers who then move to contain a crowd within a limited area.

But no-one seems to have mentioned the obvious choice...

The US government confined a large number of child migrants at its detention centre.

FumbleFingers
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    I'd guess the less-common corraled is a US variant. But I've always associated corral with the Wild West, suggesting that should be more common. There's really no need to keep your initial wrong spelling in the answer - I tried to edit, but the change was too far-reaching for anyone except yourself to get right! – Toby Speight Feb 14 '23 at 07:51
  • I was initially going to distinguish the two different spellings as AmE and BrE in my answer text (as with traveled, cancelled, etc.). But a quick check on NGrams made it obvious that this is one case where the single-L spelling is uncommon even in the AmE corpus, so I contented myself with *far less common*. – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '23 at 11:35
  • "Corral" implies driving livestock to a pen and penning them (driving as opposed to anything violent). Metaphorically, it means bringing disparate things or ideas together to a small place. It does not imply any particular crowding. – fectin Feb 14 '23 at 13:44
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    @fectin: Nonsense. No less than three words in the short M-W definition (pen, enclosure, confining) all strongly imply "crowding" into a limited area. It's effectively oxymoronic to speak of *people being corralled into a large area*. – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '23 at 14:06
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    @TobySpeight Even in American English, root-final is doubled when in a stressed syllable (cf. excel and appal, both of which get doubled in both AmE and BrE), so you wouldn’t expect there to be any non-doubled forms at all. Perhaps it’s because there’s some variation in whether the last syllable has a long or short vowel (/æl/ or /ɑːl/) in this particular word. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 14 '23 at 14:13
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: I thought that since the second syllable always carries the stress in *corral, it would have to be a "long" vowel. But the dominant orthography certainly does seem to buck the trend here. Maybe the potential confusion with (poetic) coralled* (covered with coral) is a factor? – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '23 at 14:22
  • @FumbleFingers I don’t quite follow – there are plenty of verbs with second-syllable stress and short vowels (excel, expel, repel, rappel, instil, fulfil, etc.). It is true that /-æl/ is quite a rare ending, though, especially for verbs – corral and canal appear to be the only ones. Although the OED says canal follows the general pattern of doubling in BrE and not doubling in AmE, Ngrams indicate that doubling forms are in fact more common for both words, indicating that vowel length isn’t necessarily indicative. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 14 '23 at 15:18
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: I thought *to coral* would primarily be *to cover with coral, but the full OED only has it as a rare verb meaning to make red (like coral). Anyway, it's really strange that the US/UK difference should be so much less with the verb to canal* than with *to coral. Maybe something to do with how common (rare, with to canal*) the usages are? – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '23 at 15:46
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    For me, corralling evokes the act of driving the people into an enclosure, and corralled evokes being driven, while packed as requested by the OP instead evokes the (resulting) state, not the act that led to this state. – Matthieu M. Feb 14 '23 at 15:57
  • @MatthieuM.: Well, you can *pack* just about anything from sardines to clothes into a small space. But in British English we never even used either the noun or the verb *corral* in respect of horses, so just about the only "victims / patients / objects" that might be corralled in BrE are ("victimised") people. – FumbleFingers Feb 14 '23 at 16:40
  • Re: "confined" being the obvious choice - that just means being put somewhere one cannot leave, not necessarily that the place is small or crowded. If I don't have a passport I am effectively confined to the United Kingdom, and while the UK may be small by US standards I certainly wouldn't want to travel the whole thing on foot. – Spratty Feb 16 '23 at 16:40
  • @Spratty: That's your opinion, which you're entitled to hold. But apparently, even though More Britons travelled abroad last year (2018) than any other nationality, according to official data, 15% of Britons have never been abroad (and strong swimmers can cross the English Channel, *and* tens of thousands make it into the country in rubbishy little inflatables). And yet many of us would still say How can you be "confined" in a place as big as Great Britain? – FumbleFingers Feb 16 '23 at 18:10
  • @FumbleFingers - I tend to agree with you in principle; I completely understand people associating small spaces with confinement, but nonetheless it doesn't necessarily mean that so I couldn't recommend it be used for that purpose. It's no more than a technical quibble, but if someone's looking for a definitive answer I get twitchy if one of the suggestions is even technically inappropriate. As for being "confined in a place as big as Great Britain?", well, technically mankind is currently confined to the area inside the orbit of the moon, and may be permanently confined to the solar system. – Spratty Feb 21 '23 at 16:48
  • @Spratty: The Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to *see the far side in person* when they orbited the Moon in 1968. So even though they didn't land and go for a walk, I suppose technically speaking mankind has been slightly beyond the orbit of the moon. But I won't say "already", given how long ago that was, and still no-one has landed on the far side. Anyway, as regards the exact meaning of "confined" - obviously strictly speaking you're right (mankind must surely be "confined" to the "visible universe" forever, even if we're quite certain there's more space beyond that). – FumbleFingers Feb 21 '23 at 17:11
  • ...but that doesn't justify encouraging nns to be more "correct, precise" than native speakers! :) – FumbleFingers Feb 21 '23 at 17:21
  • @FumbleFingers: re the Apollo astronauts, that's why I said "currently" - as far as I understand it, no-one can, today, this very instant, launch and exceed the moon's orbit. Maybe in a few months, but not today. And as for "that doesn't justify encouraging nns to be more "correct, precise" than native speakers!" - where I live (S.E. Essex, UK), it would be easy to argue that most non-native speakers are already more correct and precise than many of the native speakers :-) – Spratty Feb 22 '23 at 12:24
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Squash

If people or things are squashed into a place, they are put or pushed into a place where there is not enough room for them to be.

  • There were 2000 people squashed into her recent show. (Collins)
fev
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A word with positive connotations is gather, which can be transitive:

: to bring together : collect

tried to gather a crowd

Or intransitive:

: to come together in a body

: to cluster around a focus of attraction

A word with negative connotations is concentrate, also either transitive or intransitive.

: to bring or direct toward a common center or objective : focus

: gather, collect

Cuban immigrants who concentrate in Florida

Beware; this could be, in context, much too pejorative. The Nazi death camps were “concentration camps.”

KillingTime
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Davislor
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    Presumably the term concentration camp, as used in the Boer war and for the Nazi forced-labour and execution sites, originates from exactly this meaning? – Toby Speight Feb 14 '23 at 07:54
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    @TobySpeight Yes. Regardless of the etymology, however, the term “concentration camp” is now too strongly associated with the Holocaust to be used in its early-20th-century meaning. (Similarly, “eugenics” and “euthanasia” originally meant something else before the Nazis used them as euphemisms.) – Davislor Feb 14 '23 at 15:42
  • @TobySpeight And thanks for catching my typo. – Davislor Feb 14 '23 at 15:44
  • Oh, I agree about the connotations; just musing on the etymology. I should learn to keep my internal voice where it belongs... – Toby Speight Feb 14 '23 at 16:02
  • I'd note Nazi death camps are "extermination camps", built with the explicit purpose of the mass murder of Jews. They're distinct from concentration camps. – AmiralPatate Feb 16 '23 at 12:38
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Wiktionary (here amended slightly) lists 'sardine' as a verb, and includes the picturesque broadened, arguably informal, sense:

sardine ... [verb] ...

  • to fish for sardines
  • [transitive] to pack or cram together tightly [usually used with a PP, eg 'into the small room']

.........

  • [1986, The New Yorker - Vol 62]:

Would it be unbearably elitist to suggest that they would be more enjoyable still if the director removed a row or two of chairs, instead of sardining as many listeners as possible into the intimate music room?

  • [2007, Julie Kavanagh, Nureyev: The Life]:

There were already six members of the Nureyev family living in a room sixteen meters square, the children sardined on one mattress on the floor, their parents separated by only a curtain.

Another verb that could be used here is shoehorn [Cambridge Dictionary]:

shoehorn [verb] [transitive]

  • to fit something or someone into a tight place:

.........

  • We’d have to build another school to shoehorn all our students in.
  • A large number of child migrants were shoehorned / sardined into the detention centre.

Neither of these suggested verbs strongly implies 'kept over an extended period'.

Edwin Ashworth
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    "shoehorn" has the connotation of adding a small amount of new... whatever it is, to a space that is already nearly full. The idea of "fitting" is also often inherently understood to be metaphorical rather than literal. You could say that you're "shoehorning" one more child migrant into a detention centre that is already full of them, but it sounds like looking for an excuse for holding the child there, rather than physically making room. In any event it doesn't make sense for describing the overall process. – Karl Knechtel Feb 15 '23 at 23:28
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If your point is that they were kepy very close together, you could say that they were kept shoulder to shoulder. Collins defines this as follows:

If two or more people stand shoulder to shoulder, they are standing next to each other, with their shoulders touching.

alphabet
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Concentrate

to bring or come together in one place

ETYMOLOGY: 17c: from Latin con- together + centrum centre.

Source: Chambers Dictionary

This is the sense of the word which gives us 'Concentration Camp', which originally meant

A camp for the concentration and temporary accommodation of large numbers of troops awaiting active service.

Source: OED (membership login required)

and more frequently now means

a prison camp used to detain civilians who are not tolerated by the authorities, especially in Nazi Germany.

Source: Chambers Dictionary

Spagirl
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stuffed

Child migrants were stuffed into detention centres

  1. fill (a receptacle or space) tightly with something.
  2. force or cram (something) tightly into a receptacle or space.
  3. [informal] hastily force (something) into a space.

Oxford English Dictionary

minseong
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