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Strait   /streɪt/   Listen
noun
Strait  n.  (pl. straits)  
1.
A narrow pass or passage. "He brought him through a darksome narrow strait To a broad gate all built of beaten gold." "Honor travels in a strait so narrow Where one but goes abreast."
2.
Specifically: (Geog.) A (comparatively) narrow passageway connecting two large bodies of water; often in the plural; as, the strait, or straits, of Gibraltar; the straits of Magellan; the strait, or straits, of Mackinaw. "We steered directly through a large outlet which they call a strait, though it be fifteen miles broad."
3.
A neck of land; an isthmus. (R.) "A dark strait of barren land."
4.
Fig.: A condition of narrowness or restriction; doubt; distress; difficulty; poverty; perplexity; sometimes in the plural; as, reduced to great straits. "For I am in a strait betwixt two." "Let no man, who owns a Providence, grow desperate under any calamity or strait whatsoever." "Ulysses made use of the pretense of natural infirmity to conceal the straits he was in at that time in his thoughts."


verb
Strait  v. t.  To put to difficulties. (Obs.)


adjective
Strait  adj.  A variant of Straight. (Obs.)


Strait  adj.  (compar. straiter; superl. straitest)  
1.
Narrow; not broad. "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." "Too strait and low our cottage doors."
2.
Tight; close; closely fitting.
3.
Close; intimate; near; familiar. (Obs.) "A strait degree of favor."
4.
Strict; scrupulous; rigorous. "Some certain edicts and some strait decrees." "The straitest sect of our religion."
5.
Difficult; distressful; straited. "To make your strait circumstances yet straiter."
6.
Parsimonious; niggargly; mean. (Obs.) "I beg cold comfort, and you are so strait, And so ingrateful, you deny me that."


adverb
Strait  adv.  Strictly; rigorously. (Obs.)





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Strait" Quotes from Famous Books



... She wanted to protect them all and make them happy. But how could she make them happy if they would tell her nothing? They still treated her as a child but she was a woman now. Her love for Johnny. She had admitted that to herself. She stopped on the path outside the decorous strait-laced houses and put her cool gloved hand ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... Rebels under heaven, Shall take example by his punishment, How they beare armes against their soveraigne. Goe call the English Agent hether strait, Ile send my sister England newes of this, And give her warning of ...
— Massacre at Paris • Christopher Marlowe
... storied past. The career of the Rev. Harry Sanderson, known as "Satan" in his college days, who sowed the wind to reap the whirlwind and won at last through strangest penance the prize of love, seizes the reader in the strait grip of its feverish interest. Miss Rives has outdone herself in the invention of a love story that rings with lyric feeling and touches every fiber of the heart ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... He hath but permitted the oppression that we may have our fill of the glories of Egypt and be glad to turn our backs upon her. He will cure us of idols by showing forth their helplessness when they are cried unto; and when Israel is in its most grievous strait and therefore most prone to attach itself to whosoever helpeth it. He will prove Himself at last by His power. Aye, thou hast said. Israel can suffer little more without perishing. Therefore is ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... There is not a particle of evidence to suggest any connection or intercourse between aboriginal America and Asia within any such period as the last twenty thousand years, except in so far as there may perhaps now and then have been slight surges of Eskimo tribes back and forth across Bering strait. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske


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