cabin
Pluralcabins
Pluralcabins
Formscabins, cabining, cabined
- 1A small dwelling typical of the frontier, especially one built from logs with simple tools by the people who meant to live in it rather than by professional builders.
On the frontier, each family raised its own cabin from felled timber.
The trapper's cabin stood alone at the edge of the woods.
Note
The American frontier sense, and the home of the phrase log cabin: Abraham Lincoln was born in one. The word came through Middle English caban and Old French cabane from Medieval Latin capanna, and it shares that line with its doublets cabana and cabane. Here the logs and the owner-built construction are part of the picture. Outside this American sense, a cabin need not be either.
- 2
- 3The enclosed area of an airplane where passengers sit.
Once the doors closed, the cabin grew quiet as the plane taxied.
Smoke filled the cabin, and the crew began the emergency procedure.
- 4
- 5The enclosed interior of a boat, forming a small room used especially for sleeping.
Below the deck, the cabin offered just enough space for two berths.
He ducked into the cabin and lit the small stove.
Note
On a small boat there may be only one enclosed space, and then the cabin is that space itself rather than one room among many, as with a ship's private room. The American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897) gives the sloop yacht Maria a cabin finished in hard wood and yellow plush. Even a single room below deck could be fitted out with real care.
- 6A small room or any enclosed, shut-in space.
A small cabin at the entrance housed the security monitor.
Workers shelter in a heated cabin during their breaks.
Similarbooth, hut, cubicle, kiosk
Note
The broadest sense, and the one Edmund Spenser reaches for in The Faerie Queene (1590): "So long in secret cabin there he held her captive." A cabin here is simply a shut-in place, which is why it suits a scene of captivity. Modern uses such as a guard's booth or a heated shelter for workers keep the same core idea of a small enclosure.
- 7The section of a passenger plane containing seats of a single class of service.
The crew served meals in the economy cabin after takeoff.
First-class cabins offer lie-flat seats on long-haul flights.
Note
Airline and travel language divides the plane by class of service as well as by space, so a single aircraft can have several cabins. The word usually carries a class label in front of it: the economy cabin, a first-class cabin. That label is the quick way to tell this countable sense from the whole passenger area, which a plane has only one of.
- 8To restrict or limit the extent of something.
The court sought to cabin the doctrine so it would not apply broadly.
Lawmakers cabined the agency's authority to a narrow set of duties.
Similarconfine, limit, restrict, constrain, circumscribe
Oppositeexpand, broaden, extend, widen
Note
A figurative stretch of the literal confining verb. What was once shut inside a small room becomes a rule or a power kept from spreading. Its natural home is legal argument: Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019) uses it of a line of precedent. Courts and lawmakers cabin a doctrine, a holding or an agency's authority. The object is usually an idea or a power, not a person or a thing.
- 9
- 10A private office, especially one belonging to a professional such as a doctor, lawyer, or businessman.
The manager reviewed the files alone in his cabin.
Patients lined up outside the dentist's cabin all morning.
Note
An Indian English use that can surprise other readers, who may picture a hut or a ship's room. In India, a manager, doctor or lawyer works in a cabin. Tony Thakaran's 2008 review of Dasvidaniya describes a pharmaceutical boss wolfing down junk food in the privacy of his cabin. The privacy is the point: the word marks an office of one's own, apart from shared space.
- 11A small trackside building from which railroad signals and switches are operated.
From the cabin, the operator pulled levers to change the signals.
Old cabins along the line were replaced by a central control room.
Similartower
Note
Railway shorthand: the formal name for the building is signal box, and cabin is the everyday word used on the line. It belongs to informal talk about rail operations. In writing for outsiders, signal box is clearer, since a bare cabin could just as easily suggest any small enclosed room.
Less common meaning
- 12To dwell in a cabin, or as though in one; to lodge.
The soldiers cabined in rough huts along the frozen ridge.
Wanderers cabin where they can, sheltering wherever night finds them.
Note
Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus threatens to make someone "cabin in a cave," and that line catches the flavor of this sense: rough, close lodging rather than a comfortable stay. It takes no object, which sets it apart from the transitive placing verb. It is now obsolete. Recognize it when reading older texts, but in modern prose use lodge or dwell instead.
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Practice
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Origin
The word came into Middle English as caban or cabane from Old French cabane, which in turn came from Medieval Latin capanna ("a cabin"). It is a doublet of cabana and cabane.