stockade
/stɒˈkeɪd
/noun
1A barrier formed from upright wooden posts or stakes, especially as a defence against attack or as a means of confining animals: they built stockades around their towns...
- Villages of 300 to 600 people were protected by a triple-walled stockade of wooden stakes 15 to 20 feet tall.
- Hurrying across the paved stone road, they came up to the gate of the wooden stockade wall.
- The motte was an earthen mound, conical in shape and the bailey was a level area around the motte, both of which would have had a wooden stockade surrounding.
1.1An enclosure bound by a stockade: we got ashore and into the stockade...
- People were taken out of their homes and herded like cattle into stockades to await removal.
- When the savages began to encircle the livestock, the herdsmen attempted to drive the cattle into the stockade.
1.2chiefly North American A military prison: he surrendered two weeks after escaping the stockade at the air force base...
- He spent just three days in a military stockade before President Nixon ordered his release.
- At this writing, he's still locked up, indefinitely and without charges, in some military stockade.
- He spent four years in hard labour in a stockade, wearing fetters.
verb [with object] (usually as adjective stockaded)
Enclose (an area) by erecting a stockade: stockaded enclosures stockaded village settlements...
- Terraces and stockaded villages were scattered in the high mountains on both sides of the Nujiang River.
- Bent took up residence with Titoko in the stockaded village of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu (Beak of the Bird), the main stronghold of the Hauhau forces which would soon see some of the worst action of the war.
- Punishing the Pequots for the death of an English trader, Massachusetts militia attacked men, women, and children at the stockaded Mystic village, setting it ablaze and shooting escapees.
Origin
Early 17th century: shortening of obsolete French estocade, alteration of estacade, from Spanish estacada, from the Germanic base of the noun stake1.