1 [U] the state of being kept in a place, especially a prison, and prevented from leaving:
a sentence of 12 months' detention in a young offender institution * police powers of arrest and detention * allegations of torture and detention without trial * a detention camp
2 [U,C] the punishment of being kept at school for a time after other students have gone home:
They can't give me (a) detention for this.
seealsoDETAIN
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
Where does this definition of detention come from?
This entry for detention is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is detention a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, detention is tagged as noun.
Does detention appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — detention appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.