cage
Pluralcages
Pluralcages
- 1An enclosure made of bars, usually used to hold animals.
The rescued eagle stayed in a large cage until its wing healed.
Visitors watched the monkeys swing from the bars of their cages.
Note
Every other use of the word starts from this picture of an enclosure of bars. It came through Old French from Latin cavea, and jail is a relative. The bars were never kept for animals alone: in William Shakespeare's The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, a man's father "had never a house but the cage", and dangerous prisoners can still be locked away in one.
- 2To put a person or animal into a cage and keep them confined there.
Modern zoos rarely cage their big cats, relying on moats and open enclosures instead.
Many egg farms have stopped caging their laying hens.
Similarconfine
Note
Much of the verb's life is spent in arguments about how animals should be kept. Bernard Livingston's Zoo: Animals, People, Places (2000) calls the moats that ended caging many large animals a revolutionary advance, and Gail Damerow's Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (2010) blames the caging of laying hens for giving caged housing a bad name. The participle doubles as an adjective: caged hens, caged housing.
- 3Something that restricts a person's freedom, holding them in as bars would.
Years of debt had become a cage from which she saw no way out.
The expectations we inherit from our families can become cages we never notice.
Note
The metaphor rarely travels alone; it tends to bring its key and its way out along with it. In "My Body Is a Cage", by Jeremy Gara and Régine Chassagne on Neon Bible (2007), the line is answered by the mind as the thing that can unlock it. The word usually follows is or become: the body is a cage, years of debt became one.
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- 5The enclosed compartment of an elevator in which passengers ride.
The miners crowded into the cage for the long ride down the shaft.
The old hotel's elevator still works, its brass cage creaking between floors.
Similarcar
- 6A prison, or a cell within one.
Three years in the cage taught him to keep his head down.
After the riot, the whole block spent a week locked in their cages.
Note
Prison slang that keeps the picture of the animal enclosure: to call a cell a cage is to say the people inside are kept like beasts. Robyn Shawnee Jackson, writing in Gay Community News in 1985, describes harassment from inside what she calls "the Iowa Cages". The word carries that bitterness; in neutral writing, prison, jail or cell is the plain choice.
- 7To put or keep someone in prison.
Prosecutors want to cage him for the rest of his life.
Both brothers were caged after the bank job went wrong.
Note
It is the verb partner of the prison slang and has the same hard edge. It sits most naturally in the passive with a term attached, as in caged for life or caged for twenty years, and it belongs to blunt talk; a news report or a court would say jailed or imprisoned instead.
- 8The goal in ice hockey, field hockey, or water polo, which players shoot at to score.
The winger's wrist shot rang off the post and into the cage.
Their goalkeeper guarded the cage brilliantly in the water polo final.
Note
A picture word from the rink and the field: the netted goal frame is seen as a barred enclosure that the puck or ball must get into. It usually comes with the or a team's possessive, so a shot goes into the cage and a goalkeeper guards their cage, and it works as a livelier name for the goal rather than a replacement for it.
- 9A protective wire mask fitted to the front of a helmet, as worn in baseball or ice hockey.
A slap shot cracked against his cage, but he skated off unhurt.
The catcher's helmet has a cage that covers his whole face.
Similarmask
Note
In hockey the usual choice is between a cage and a visor, a clear plastic shield that covers only the eyes and upper face. A cage guards the whole face, which is why it is the protection that rules for young players often call for. Baseball uses the word for the same kind of wire grille on a catcher's helmet.
- 10In track and field, the area from which competitors throw the discus or hammer.
The hammer throwers took turns in the cage during the final.
Her best discus throw of the season came on her last attempt in the cage.
Note
The name comes from the netting: a tall net hung from posts around the throwing circle and open only toward the field, so a discus or hammer that slips from the thrower's hand is stopped before it can reach officials or spectators. A thrower steps into the cage for each attempt, and the throw leaves it through the open side.
- 11A scornful slang name for an automobile.
The driver of the cage never even saw my bike before he swung into my lane.
After twenty years on two wheels, he hated being stuck in a cage all winter.
Note
American slang with contempt built in: the car is pictured as a box that shuts its driver in. The scorn falls on vehicle and driver together, so the word suits casual talk among people who share that view. Said to a driver it is a taunt, and in ordinary writing about traffic or driving it reads as hostile rather than descriptive.
- 12In killer sudoku, an irregularly shaped group of cells whose digits must all be different and add up to a given total, on top of the ordinary sudoku rules.
The cage in the top corner totals 3, so its two cells must hold a 1 and a 2.
Experienced solvers start with the smallest cages, where the possible combinations of digits are fewest.
- 13In carpentry, an outer timber framework that encloses something within it, such as the woodwork around a staircase.
The carpenters framed a timber cage around the staircase before the walls were plastered.
Inside the old mill, the grinding machinery sat within a heavy oak cage.
Similarframework
- 14In engineering, an open skeleton frame that limits the movement of a loose part, such as a ball valve.
As water pressure lifts the ball off its seat, the cage stops it from rising into the outlet.
The engineers redesigned the cage so the loose plunger could no longer jam sideways in the valve body.
Note
Its real work shows when the flow reverses. In a pump or check valve the loose ball or plug lifts off its seat to let fluid through; the cage keeps it from rising too far or drifting sideways, so that when the flow turns back it drops straight onto its seat and closes the valve. Being open, the frame guides the part without blocking the flow.
- 15A strainer made of wirework, used with pumps and pipes.
Leaves clogged the cage on the end of the suction pipe, and the pump lost its prime.
The farmer fitted a wire cage over the pump intake to keep frogs and weeds out of the line.
Similarstrainer
- 16In mining, the drum of a hoisting whim, around which the rope is wound.
As the horses walked their circle, the rope wound onto the cage and the ore bucket rose from the shaft.
The rope had slipped off the cage, so the whim was stopped before the load could drop.
Similardrum
Note
A whim is a winding machine set beside a mine shaft, often turned by horses walking a circle, and this cage is the drum at its center: as it turns, the rope wraps around it and the bucket or load rises up the shaft. It never goes down the shaft itself, which is what separates it from the compartment passengers ride in.
- 17In aviation, to lock an artificial horizon in place so that it cannot move.
Pilots cage the artificial horizon before a steep aerobatic routine so the gyro does not tumble.
With the horizon caged, the display stayed frozen while the plane rolled through the maneuver.
Similarlock
Note
Locking the gyroscope protects it: with the instrument caged, its gimbals are not slammed against their stops while the aircraft rolls, loops or flies inverted. Afterward, in level flight, the pilot uncages it and the horizon goes back to showing the aircraft's attitude.
- 18In graph theory, a regular graph that has the fewest vertices possible for its girth.
She proved that the graph was a cage, since no smaller cubic graph has the same girth.
Finding cages of large girth is hard, and for many degrees their exact size is still unknown.
Note
Graph theorists name them by two numbers: an (r,g)-cage has exactly r edges meeting at every vertex, and its girth, the length of its shortest cycle, is g. No graph meeting both conditions has fewer vertices, though more than one graph can share that minimum, which is why one speaks of a cage of a given degree and girth rather than always the cage.
- 19To track individual responses to a direct-mail campaign, whether to build up a mailing list or to find voters who no longer live at their registered addresses.
Critics said the campaign planned to cage voters by mailing letters and challenging anyone whose letter came back undeliverable.
The fundraising firm cages every reply card it receives, so the donor list stays accurate.
Note
In politics the practice usually goes by the name voter caging, and the names gathered from returned mail make up a caging list used to challenge registrations. A letter can come back for many reasons besides a move, so the tactic is often criticized for removing eligible voters. In direct-mail fundraising the same word is routine list-keeping.
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Origin
From Middle English cage, from Old French cage, from Latin cavea. It is a doublet of cadge and cavea, and is related to jail.