- 1監禁、坐牢（法律上常說「判處…有期徒刑」）
Imprisonment is the state of being kept in prison, and it is also the stretch of time someone spends there. A judge may give a person 'three years' imprisonment': that is the sentence, the time they must stay locked up. The word is a little formal. In everyday talk people more often say 'he is in prison', 'she went to jail', or 'he did time'. You will meet imprisonment in the news, in court, and in history books. Though actually, the tidy picture is always a building with locks, but writers also stretch the word a little — the imprisonment of a people, or of the mind — when they mean someone is trapped and not free to leave. The core idea does not change: you cannot go.
From the word’s history
From Anglo-Norman emprisonement, from Old French emprisonnement; imprison + -ment.
imprison 加 -ment，借自盎格魯諾曼文。
組成imprison (to put someone in prison) + -ment (turns the verb into a noun for the state or the time). From Anglo-Norman emprisonement, from Old French emprisonnement.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
imprisonmentnoun/ɪmˈpɹɪzn̩.mənt/
- 1
A confinement in a place, especially a prison or a jail, especially as punishment for a crime.
- His sinews woxen weake and raw / Through long emprisonment and hard constraint.
- Every confinement of the person is an imprisonment, whether it be in a common prison, or in a private house, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。